Economy | ANALYSIS
Households to take hit from tax hike
by Tomoko Otake
The consumption tax increase will hit every household in Japan hard, with many people’s financial future hanging on whether their wages rise enough to offset the hike's impact.
Art Topics
Art Aug 7, 2013
The beauty of 'man'-kind
by Yoko Haruhara
While the ukiyo-e woodblock prints depicting beautiful young Japanese women of the Edo Period (1603-1867) are world-renowned, an equally worthy genre and common theme tends to get overlooked: that of handsome men. The imaginative exhibition “Handsome Boys and Good-looking Men of Edo,” currently on ...
Art Jul 31, 2013
Big works buoyed by Dojima River's 'Little Water'
by Mio Yamada
Standing in front of the largest work at the Dojima River Biennale, currently showing at the Dojima River Forum in Fukushima, Osaka, is a mesmerizing experience. A 10-meter-tall digital projection of an ethereal cascading waterfall, it glows mysteriously as its gentle rumbling permeates the ...
Art Jul 31, 2013
Understanding the fun side of Surrealism
by C.B. Liddell
Part of the reason for the success of Surrealism in the 1920s and ’30s was its sexual dimension. This element, covered over by a veneer of respectable intellectualism, had a powerful attraction at a time when sexuality was much more circumscribed by social morality ...
Art Jul 30, 2013
Crowdsourced art project to printout the Web honors free-information activist
by Dan Zak
The World Wide Web began to show up by snail mail at the end of May. It arrived on sheets of office paper, stacked in white boxes, slipped into bubble-wrapped manila sleeves, folded into a clean, white business envelope with Rosa Parks stamps, stuffed ...
Art Jul 24, 2013
Crawling through the mud in style
by Robert Yellin
It’s quite fitting that the major Osamu Suzuki (1926-2001) retrospective, the first since the ceramicist’s passing, is taking place at The National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, the hometown of the artist. Suzuki was one of Japan’s most important ceramic artists of the ...
Art Jul 24, 2013
The Pushkin's masterpieces cannot fail to inspire
by C.B. Liddell
There are a lot of people who wish that art had simply stopped around 1911 or so. If it had, we would have been spared many of the monstrosities that modern art then proceeded to unleash — urinals in art galleries, randomly distributed paint, ...
Art Jul 17, 2013
The different brush strokes of Tani Buncho
by Rhiannon Paget
The latest exhibition at the Suntory Museum of Art commemorates the 250th anniversary of the birth of Tani Buncho — a painter, connoisseur and art historian of formidable energy and with an insatiable drive for knowledge. Of samurai lineage, Buncho underwent foundational art training ...
Art Jul 17, 2013
Japan's population of ghouls keeps coming back to haunt us
by C.B. Liddell
Caught up in the rush of modernity, it is sometimes easy to forget just what a unique and unusual country Japan is. An exhibition such as “Yokai: Demons, Folklore Creatures and GeGeGe no Kitaro” serves to remind us, by peeling back the surface of ...
Art Jul 11, 2013
Contact Gonzo explores our animal instincts
by Alisa Yamasaki
Improvisation group contact Gonzo will collaborate with Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media on Aug. 24-26 to present “Hey you, ask the animals,” an outdoor tour that encourages participants to create their own trails through the same kind of instinctive movements an animal would ...
Art Jul 11, 2013
Experiments in the wild
by Tomoko Otake
Ten years ago, when a new cultural facility opened in the western Japan city of Yamaguchi, its founders sought to fulfill a role quite different from those museums in the countryside. Unlike many public museums in rural Japan that function as touring venues for ...
Art Jul 11, 2013
Nishio takes apparel approach to art
by Alisa Yamasaki
Yoshinari Nishio is one of the winners of the “Life by Media” competition at Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) and is currently displaying his project, “Pubrobe,” there until Sept. 1. It’s an atypical piece, a station where people lend and borrow clothes for ...
Art Jul 10, 2013
Surveying the city from a different viewpoint
by Stuart Munro
Beside Stephan Balkenhol’s sculpture “Big Head with Three Part Relief” a note reads, “Nothing here is as it should be.” This figureless “head” set against a black void represents “Mr. Everyman,” that common figure, detached from his surround and considering his place in the ...