Matthew Larking - The Japan Times

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Matthew Larking

For Matthew Larking's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Mar 27, 2008

Detached or mundane?

The fame that Yosa Buson (1716-1783) enjoyed as a painter and haiku poet in his own lifetime quickly eroded in the years following his death. And while his poetic reputation was restored as early as the 19th century, it was only in the years following World War II that his paintings once again became acclaimed.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Feb 28, 2008

The time before the 'starchitects'

A brief respite from the 21st century's relentless demand for "starchitects" — exemplified by Rem Koolhaas, Tadao Ando and Frank Gehry — can be found at the Museum of Modern Art, Shiga, in "100 Years of W. M. Vories' Works."

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Feb 14, 2008

Sculpting the sacred and the profane

Given the boom in all things Edo in recent years — perhaps best exemplified by the explosion of interest in last year's The Price Collection's tour of Japan, featuring the artists Ito Jakuchu, Maruyama Okyo and Nagasawa Rosetsu — it is surprising that there hasn't been equal attention paid to the sculpture of the period.

CULTURE / Art

Feb 7, 2008

"Takayasu Itoh: From Painting to Environment"

Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Jan 24, 2008

Quixotic quest of a 'revolutionary'

Breaking away from the herd, exploring new artistic directions and assuming time itself will bring the ultimate vindication is one of the great romantic ideas of avant-garde painting in the 20th century. But rather than defining the field for generations ahead, such an artist risks simply becoming obscure, or worse, forgotten.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Dec 13, 2007

The printer who wished to paint

Masuo Ikeda's polymath abilities in the arts — ranging from printmaking to writing and ceramics — is mirrored in his diverse depictions of feminine eroticism. Posed provocatively in Ikeda's works are his versions of Venus, virgins, brides, generic types and femme fatales, the Madonna of the Annunciation and Yang Guifei, the renowned Chinese beauty who led the Tang Dynasty emperor Xuanzong to neglect his affairs of state.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Nov 1, 2007

Skin goes only so deep

Nothing has changed since Aristotle noted a couple of thousand years ago that "it is not possible without considerable disgust to look upon the blood, flesh and similar parts of which the human body is constructed." Much here in "Skin of/in Contemporary Art," at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, until Dec. 2, is not pretty. One's own physical reactions to the artworks, by an international cast of 11 creators, are often of discomfort, both informing and heightening the viewing experience.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Sep 20, 2007

Traditional China popped

After the end of the Opium War in China in 1842, Shanghai opened itself to trade with the outside world. A little after that, the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-64, which took place in southern China and Nanjing, funneled into the metropolis artists and scholars seeking refuge.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Aug 23, 2007

Late to the art party in the 1980s

"Place" and "presence" were two of the core concerns of Minimalism, the last thread of Modernism before it collapsed into Postmodernism's stylistic confusion in the 1970s.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Aug 16, 2007

Obsessed with the super-real

Regardless of one's own relationship to religion, many of us are disposed to believe we can transcend the present world, rising above it to another super-reality, to a surreal world.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Jul 19, 2007

Sounds of smallness

Settling down into Yukio Fujimoto's "Ears with Chair" (1990) and adjusting the two long tubes on either side to your ears, the drone of the electronic organs on the surrounding walls both intensifies and hollows out. The hushed voices of mingling spectators magnify, as do passing footsteps. You cannot help but feel eloquently isolated, set apart from all else that goes on around you. It is a subtle experience that is pregnant with significance, and partly inexplicable.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

May 17, 2007

Creating atmospheres

An array of recent exhibitions in Kyoto and Osaka offers an engaging cross section of contemporary art practice in western Japan.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

May 3, 2007

Breakthrough women

In 18th- and 19th-century Japan, the presence of female artists in painting circles slowly increased until in the 20th century, social reforms allowed them access to secondary education and vocational schools as well as art training, patronage and chances to compete in national exhibitions.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Mar 15, 2007

Testing nihonga's limits

Finding their personal voice, something an artist can call their own, is a sublime achievement. The nihonga (Japanese-style) painter Insho Domoto (1891-1975) channeled the voices of at least a dozen others to forge his own unique one and create an exhaustive and encyclopedic body of work.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Mar 1, 2007

Storm clouds over an artist's life cut short

In the summer of 1924, fresh out of art school in Japan and settling into the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris, Yuzo Saeki (1898-1928) was taken by his classmate Katsuzo Satomi to have his work critiqued by the Fauvist painter, anarchist and journalist Maurice de Vlaminck. Just when he was getting under way as an artist, it was to be a decisive moment in Saeki's painting career. What the French painter said about what Saeki showed him was a typical Vlaminck outburst: "What academicism!" he said, referring to the style taught in the major schools in Paris.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Jan 25, 2007

Modernizers of Japanese art tended toward tradition

In the drive to modernize Japanese art in the 19th century, artists frequently attempted to create a fusion of Eastern and Western styles of painting. But what at first sight seemed to be radical combinations of the two, now actually appear to be more happily at home within pre-existing Japanese traditions.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Jan 18, 2007

"The World of Immortals"

Kyoto National Museum Closes in 11 days

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Dec 7, 2006

Teasing out new meanings from old works

'Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art," quipped the playwright Tom Stoppard in an essay in 2000.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Nov 16, 2006

A realist and an eccentric

'If you want a real painting, you must come to see me. If it's only a drawing you're after, you should try Okyo," the artist Soga Shohaku famously joked about Maruyama Okyo (1733-95), a renowned practitioner of Western modes of representation.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Sep 21, 2006

Qi Baishi updated literati painting with new subjects

'Too much likeness flatters the vulgar taste," said Qi Baishi, "too much unlikeness deceives the world." In the Chinese literati tradition, whose many intellectual ideals were developed by Su Shi, a satirical 11th-century Northern Song Dynasty poet, calligrapher and statesman, realism was considered a graceless pursuit.

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