When speaking of Japanese art, people use words such as wabi and sabi, words that speak of a delicate sensibility and an ephemeral existence. Viewing the retrospective show of painter Toko Shinoda, the first word that comes to mind is "power."

"Outsider art" is relatively new in Japan and, as a genre, works made by self-taught Japanese artists are still not very well known on the category-delineating, label-loving international art scene.

At age 41, Takashi Fujii has quite the resume. In 2000 and 2001, he appeared on national broadcaster NHK’s annual top-rated New Year’s variety show, “Kohaku Utagassen” (“Red and White Song Battle”); he toured abroad as a pop singer in 2004, including shows in ...

“The number of Shinto shrines in Japan has changed over centuries due to various political and social changes. There were about 190,000 shrines during the early Meiji Era (1867-1912), before a drastic change came about in the merging of shrines and temples. The number ...

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.