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

Apr 24, 2018

Ike no Taiga: The 'true view' travel painter

"The Genius of Ike no Taiga: Carefree Traveler, Legendary Painter," at Kyoto National Museum, is magisterial. Edo Period (1603-1868) Kyoto teemed with big name painters, but Taiga (1723-1776) was superlative.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Apr 10, 2018

Kyotographie is still on the up and up

The sixth edition of Kyotographie, Kyoto's annual celebration of local and international photography, which opens in venues across the city on April 14, is titled "Up." This year, the collection of exhibitions address France-Japan relations: the 160th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations and the 60th anniversary of Paris and Kyoto's sister city covenant.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Apr 3, 2018

When art met craft in Meiji Era Japan

The focus of "The 150th Anniversary of the Meiji Period: Making and Designing Meiji Arts and Crafts" at The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, concerns the relationship between nihonga (Japanese-style) painters of Kyoto and craft production during a time when craft and design were part of the government's national strategy for the pursuit of economic benefits. The exhibition also touches on the late 19th century's national and international expositions, craft masterpieces of the time, and innovations introduced by the German chemist, Gottfried Wagener (1831-1892). It was Wagener's underglaze painting techniques that achieved the gradation effects of traditional painting on Asahi ware ceramics, such as that of the displayed "Tiles with Grapes Design in Underglaze" (1890-1896).

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Mar 13, 2018

Turner: The landscaper of art genres

J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) remains among the most adored of British landscapists. His natural draftsman talent, in union with the hard work ethic of his time led to recognition and formal training at the Royal Academy of Arts, where he was elected to become one of the institution's esteemed Academicians in 1802. That year, Turner also embarked on the first of his many sketching tours of Europe, the results of which are, along with other works, presently on show at The Museum of Kyoto.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Feb 27, 2018

The multifaceted talents of Seiji Togo

Seiji Togo (1897-1978) has been characterized as having two distinctive career phases corresponding to youth and maturity. The first was as a pioneer of European modern movements in Japan. The second was as a postwar painter of simplified and smoothly contoured female beauties that received popular acclaim in Japan. The retrospective at the Abeno Harukas Art Museum, Osaka, addresses the artists' spread, but focuses on the transitional decades of the 1930s though to the '50s that correspond to Togo's middle age.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Feb 13, 2018

An excavation of hu-man traits

The excavation of the tomb of the Tang Dynasty general Mu Tai (660-729, buried in 730) took place in Qingcheng County in China's Gansu Province in 2001. Unearthed were colorfully painted and realistically detailed small-scale sculptures of "foreign" peoples and their animals, such as horses and camels, which were used for transport and livelihood. These stand as counterpoints to the better known figural realism in bronzes of the earlier Warring States (475-221 B.C.) and Western Han (206 B.C.-A.D. 9) periods, and also the revered Terracotta Army made for the Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huang (259-210 B.C.).

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Jan 30, 2018

Van Gogh's long-distance love affair

"Van Gogh & Japan" concerns a love affair of creative misperceptions between temporally and geographically distant admirers. Van Gogh (1853-1890) never went to Japan, though he idealized it briefly as a utopia in which artists worked communally in converse with nature.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Jan 2, 2018

The zero hour of Kobe's avant-garde

Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art's present draw card is the Saint Petersburg collection, "Old Masters from the State Hermitage Museum." But on a lower level, at the far end of a long corridor gallery, are photos and grainy videos — the small-scale documentation of one of Japan's little-known postwar happening/public-performance avant-garde groups — 0 (Group Zero). Group Zero is comparable in scope and activity, if not in longevity, to The Play, another avant-garde group that also began in Kobe a few years earlier.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Books

Dec 23, 2017

Accounts and Images of Six Kannon in Japan

An 11th-century text, "A Tale of Flowering Fortunes," described the Six Kannon who "filled the worlds in the 10 directions with innumerable rays of light, which manifested in their colors the bodhisattva resolve to benefit all living beings everywhere."

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Nov 28, 2017

The beginning, end and rebirth of sculpture

The subtitle given to the retrospective of the 60-year career of Osaka-based Michio Fukuoka is oxymoronic: "A Sculptor Who No Longer Sculpts." He used to, but became frustrated and filled with doubt about creativity and so he made sculpture anyway, often about "doing nothing."

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Nov 14, 2017

Sachiko Kodama's laws of attraction

Entering the tatami-mat tearoom-style exhibition spaces at the back of Kyoto's specialist pewter art craft gallery, Seikado, spectators are apprised that the magnetism of the pieces on display might interfere with the strips on their credit cards. Those fitted with pacemakers are also asked to stand 50 centimeters back from artworks.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Oct 31, 2017

What makes a National Treasure?

Together, Japan's National Treasures provide a cacophonous ode to the nation and its heritage for its historical, cultural, geographical and stylistic dissonances. Yet, this is the first time in 41 years that 210 such works (or sets) have been displayed en masse.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Sep 19, 2017

The bigger picture is in the details

Tetsu Fusen (1891-1976) was regarded as an unusual though gifted painter in his own time. In the decades since, however, he has largely been forgotten, mostly known to specialists or devoted connoisseurs of his technically brilliant, imaginative and emotional landscapes.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Sep 12, 2017

Modern lacquer recalls past splendor

Celebrated domestically and internationally for tea ceremony caddies in lacquer and mother-of-pearl inlay, as well as rather more substantial fittings such as kimono display hangers, artisan Tatsuaki Kuroda (1904-82) has finally been honored with the first Kyoto retrospective exhibition of his work.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Sep 5, 2017

A somber prelude to riots of color

Koji Kinutani's entire career — from his student work to his metaphysical portraiture, which inaugurated a manga trend in contemporary art; his Styrofoam sculptures; the "Goddess of the Silvery Peak" (the basis for the official 1998 Nagano Winter Olympic Games poster); and his sometimes frightening Kyoto landscapes — is up for review at The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. All this led to his appointment to The Japan Art Academy in 2001 and recognition as a Person of Cultural Merit in 2014.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Aug 22, 2017

Take a journey into the art of darkness

Terror and tragedy are widely considered entirely disagreeable in principle. But audiences have for millennia taken pleasure in the pain of narrative spectacles in the arts. Fear is popular because it arouses curiosity in addition to revulsion. So, too, does the assemblage of Western works from the 16th to 20th centuries in "Fear in Painting."

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Aug 8, 2017

Buddhist hells are frighteningly human

Popularly known as Genshin (942-1017), the high-ranking Buddhist prelate Eshin Sozu was said to have been born following his devout mother's prayers to the Kannon of Takaoji Temple in Taima, Nara Prefecture.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Jul 11, 2017

Painting between the lines

The pairing of Hideki Kimura's prints with the seemingly sculptural assemblages of Sadaharu Horio is perhaps unexpected. What draws them together, however, are conceptions of their practices as painting. Both veterans of Japan's contemporary art scene, they pursue painting by other means, working within self-imposed limitations that engage conventions across art genres in alluring small-scale works.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Jun 13, 2017

Ryan Gander looks back with humor

British artist Ryan Gander does the spread of contemporary art polysemy through objects, installations, paintings, photography and video. All is brought under the rubric of "conceptual" art, for which the catalog of "These wings aren't for flying" at The National Museum of Art, Osaka, names him the new "standard-bearer."

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Jun 6, 2017

Alternative realities of realism

"Realism" can be a frustratingly indeterminate term. It can be used to refer to individual paintings, and it can be a conceptual placeholder that seemingly encapsulates the entire history of the Western Renaissance, and other, fine arts through to modernism.

From easily navigable train stations to the helpfulness of its municipal staff, Tokyo has earned high praise for its commitment to accessibility for disabled travelers.

[Rebroadcast] Japan is doing better on accessibility than you may think

When trying to trace your lineage in Japan, the "koseki" is the most important form of document you'll encounter.

Climbing the branches of a Japanese family tree

By Alex K.T. Martin

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Prize winner Maki Imoto catches light with glass

Prize winner Maki Imoto catches light with glass

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