Much of Belgian artist Francis Alÿs' work and life have been determined by chance.

“Japanese Ghosts and Eerie Creatures,” which features a selection of works from the mid-Edo Period to the Showa Era, is mostly play, with little horror.

Some artists suffer more to create their work than others. Angela Su certainly has. In her nude photographic series titled “The Hartford Girl and Other Stories,” she had lines of text tattooed — without ink — onto her back to produce red welts in ...

Roppongi Hills was unlike anything Tokyo had ever seen before. Until it opened 10 years ago, Roppongi was more often seen as a "High Touch Town," where businessmen partied with foreign hostesses and off-duty soldiers packed the nightclubs.

Harmony can sometimes have a disconcerting side. This is one insight to emerge from the Raphael exhibition at the National Museum of Western Art, the centerpiece of which is one of the artist’s acknowledged great works, the “Madonna del Granduca” (c. 1505). In his ...

Confronting the ongoing state of transformation that characterizes their native Singapore, two artists exhibiting at a new exhibition, “Welcome to the Jungle,” adopt quite different approaches and media. Francis Ng in “Constructing Construction #1″ turns his camera on an unfinished section of an ugly ...

With Toyo Ito winning this year’s Pritzker Prize last month — “architecture’s Nobel” — Japan’s architects continue to bestride the international architectural world as colossi.

While largely beneath the contemporary-art radar, painting for Japanese temples by the stars of the postwar art world is a relatively common activity, though largely restricted to nihonga.

The 1970s was an important decade for the development of Japanese pop-cultural icons. Kindergarten children back then would likely have been introduced to the characters Doraemon (1969), Anpanman (1973) and Hello Kitty (1974).

Architecture is rooted in the basic human need for shelter. But the profession today pays little attention to situations where the need for shelter is most urgent, such as after a disaster.

“It’s come pretty much out of nowhere,” says British Museum curator Tim Clark, placing a small wooden box on the table — it’s about the dimensions of a shoebox, slightly weathered and lightly inscribed with fluid kanji characters. “It was in Japan until last ...

Although photography entered Japan in the mid-19th century, it took time to spread beyond the few port cities permitted to engage in trade with the West at that time. As a result, it was several decades before this imported Western technology reached outlying districts, ...