Politics & Diplomacy
Hashimoto to retract sex suggestion for U.S. military
Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto aims to retract his remark that U.S. servicemen in Okinawa should use the local adult entertainment industry to avoid committing sex crimes.
Art | INSIDE ART Aug 16, 2012
New MoMA show promises to put Tokyo, and Japan, on the world art map
by Edan Corkill
Local commentators have long bemoaned Japanese art historians’ apparent inability to contextualize their country’s artistic output within the global art-history narrative. Thank goodness for MoMA. New York’s Museum of Modern Art will from Nov. 18 host a large exhibition devoted to the artistic ferment ...
Art | INSIDE ART Dec 1, 2011
Restless Arab region presents curatorial challenge
by Edan Corkill
In mid-February, Mori Art Museum Associate Curator Kenichi Kondo noticed an article on the Nafas website, which specializes in art news from the Middle East. Egyptian media artist Ahmed Basiony, it said, had gone to Tahrir Square in Cairo to join the protests against ...
Art | INSIDE ART Jul 7, 2011
Public to benefit from art indemnity system
by Edan Corkill
If you’ve ever thought that the ¥1,500 admission ticket at the average touring exhibition in Tokyo is too expensive, consider this: The cost of insuring artworks for trips to Japan is around 0.2 percent of their appraised value. So, imagine a Vincent van Gogh ...
Art | INSIDE ART Jun 25, 2010
Japan learns about itself from the outside
by Edan Corkill
Corporate Japan’s high-profile purchases of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterpieces during the bubble-economy in the late 1980s and early 1990s are generally seen as examples of senseless posturing. But imagine how those paintings — the ones that remain in this country, that is — would ...
Art | INSIDE ART Apr 30, 2010
Japan's modern art gets an online boost
by Edan Corkill
T he Bank of Japan has come under a lot of fire of late, but there’s at least one thing it can be proud of: the work of former employee Rasa Tsuda. The 30-year-old, who spent three and a half years at the bank ...
Art | INSIDE ART Mar 19, 2010
Curator reveals lessons learned from stint at foreign museum
by Edan Corkill
Japan’s art world is occasionally compared to the Galapagos Islands — and not just because it is inhabited by some curious creatures; sorry, I mean artists. No, the theory is that Charles Darwin’s famous comment on the Galapagos’ isolation could equally be applied to ...
Art | INSIDE ART Dec 25, 2008
If you don't get them with art, give them architecture
by Edan Corkill
Struggling to maintain visitor numbers, often in the face of drastic cuts to their budgets, many of Japan’s museums have been turning to an unlikely source of respite: architecture. That’s not to say they are pursuing the so-called Bilbao Effect, whereby the museum constructs ...
Art | INSIDE ART Nov 27, 2008
Asian art 'madness' a la mode
by Edan Corkill
“Sometimes I think they’re all too young to remember what it was like 20 years ago,” said Australian curator-turned- academic Caroline Turner at the 3rd Asian Art Museum Directors’ Forum, held in Tokyo last week. In fact, 20 years ago almost the only Asian ...
Art | INSIDE ART Oct 30, 2008
Poof! goes the art work as taboos broken
by Edan Corkill
The skies above the Hiroshima Peace Memorial were perfectly clear last Tuesday morning — until a small plane appeared and started writing in smoke a Japanese word that could be translated as “Bang!” In an article the next day, the local Chugoku Shimbun reported ...
Art | INSIDE ART Sep 25, 2008
Papers big players in the canvas game
by Edan Corkill
Japan’s largest Pablo Picasso exhibition ever opens in Tokyo next month. It’s so big it occupies not one but two venues — the National Art Center, Tokyo, and the Suntory Museum of Art in Roppongi. The idea that an exhibition could monopolize two museums ...
Art | INSIDE ART Aug 28, 2008
Why curators stay at home
by Edan Corkill
When I interviewed 28-year-old curator Shinya Watanabe a month ago, he surprised me when he said his dream was to curate Documenta, the massive exhibition of international contemporary art held once every five years in Kassel, Germany. He might as well have said all ...
Art | INSIDE ART Jul 31, 2008
You can always buy your way in
by Edan Corkill
Art changes with the times, so why shouldn’t art galleries? Some say that Japan’s unique “rental gallery” system, where young artists pay hundreds of thousands of yen per week to show their work, is on its last legs. If so, is it a case ...