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 25, 2013

In front and behind closed temple doors

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.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Apr 11, 2013

Idiosyncrasies of the Kano school explored in Kyoto

Kano Masanobu (1434-1530) founded the Chinese-art influenced painting school that bears his family name and flourished in different forms through to the Meiji Era (1868-1912). A familiar tale is that as it became the dominant hierarchical painting academy of political and military patronage, it began...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Mar 7, 2013

Hitoko Urago's 'Connected': blot-tests of portraiture

Hitoko Urago pairs paintings — portraits with abstractions — though each work is not necessarily conceived at the same time. "Untitled (Lynda)" (2012), for example, depicts a profile of a black woman with big hair against a green background. She is paired with a soft, spotty green abstraction, which...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Feb 28, 2013

'What We See' is not always what you get

Rendered as "What We See" in English, the title of this show should perhaps more accurately follow the Japanese one, which would be: "Dream, Reality, Illusion?"

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Feb 14, 2013

Breathing life into the forgotten and neglected

Painter Daisuke Fukunaga (b.1981) states: "If the world is the stage of a theater, I want to paint the bustle of the things waiting behind the blackout curtain rather than the heroine." His motifs are of things forgotten and neglected, but unlike his earlier works of 2007, which realistically depicted...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Feb 14, 2013

Go with the flow from representational to abstract

For five years starting in 2007, Shinpei Kusanagi (b.1973) made monthly serialized paintings to accompany installments of Teru Miyamoto's novel "Mizu no Katachi" ("The Shape of Water") in the magazine éclat. Text and image had little to do with one another, though the small, standard format paintings...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Jan 3, 2013

Western influences on Suda's nostalgic East

The fusion of East and West is a major theme in 20th-century art, even though, in important ways, the two don't mix. What seems at one point to be their ostensible unification, appears in another as discordant. Such inconsonance lurks in the background at the retrospective of Kunitaro Suda's work at...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Dec 13, 2012

Tadanori Yokoo unearths a future from personal past

The establishment of a museum in the name of an individual is always, to a degree, a memorializing issue in preparation for the inevitable. The inauguration of the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art in many ways heralds such, and Yokoo's oeuvre has often been a dialogue with death.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Nov 22, 2012

The fall and rise of "The Greek"

For an artist, expatriation can be a kind of death — because for an artist, it can mean estrangement from the contexts and locations that secure a place in the annals of history that tend to emphasize centers over peripheries. El Greco (1541-1614), "The Greek," was born Domenico Theotocopoulos...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Nov 15, 2012

A fine line separates calligraphy and what's called 'art'

The late 19th and 20th centuries witnessed a series of flip-flops among scholars as to whether calligraphy could be considered a fine art. Compared to painting and sculpture, wrote painter Koyama Shotaro in 1882, calligraphy did not attain the level of an art based on the Western models that were taking...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Nov 8, 2012

Kyoto painting schools pushed nihonga to the limit

Japan, as elsewhere, has never had a singular art world but a plurality of formations. This is as true of pre-modern art as it is for Modernism and contemporary art — think of Takashi Murakami, his "factory" Kaikai Kiki and Geisai the art fair he founded. Individuals could, as now, constitute worlds...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Sep 6, 2012

Fanning the flames of art

Shingo Tanaka (b. 1983) has installed his panels so seamlessly into Kyoto's eN arts gallery that the works first appear to be done on the walls. Though having trained as an oil painter, the soft scumblings and wisps of smoke and licks of fire in a restricted palette of black and ochres on white background,...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Aug 23, 2012

Exploring themes of dimensions and time, Japan's contemporary art scene is a cosmos of its own

"The Cosmos as Metaphor' at Taka Ishii Gallery and Hotel Anteroom Kyoto is almost entirely engaging. Bringing together many diverse artists, the expectation is that the exhibition concept is spread wide. Indeed "Multi-dimensional and magical time spaces" along with "untouched civilizations" and "other...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Aug 2, 2012

Contemporary Japanese artists strive to create works uninfluenced by the West

"Real Japanesque: The Unique World of Japanese Contemporary Art" at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, is in many ways a trying exhibition. Its concept claims that Japanese artists born after the 1970s are attempting to create something entirely new and that they are distancing themselves from imitating...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Jun 28, 2012

Expressions that lie between functionality and art

"Function Dysfunction" at the Tomio Koyama Gallery, Kyoto, brings together the ceramic works of three Americans: ceramicists Adam Silverman and Ani Kasten, and sculptor Alma Allen. Silverman, who felt that their works shared an aesthetic DNA, brought the three together, explaining that their pieces,...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Jun 21, 2012

Painting in awe of nature and the act of creation

Makito Okada, in his solo show at the imura art gallery, Kyoto, is concerned with rehabilitating the 18th- and 19th-century preoccupation with the Romantic aesthetic concept of the sublime. Instead of man being seen as in harmony with the natural world, obtaining aesthetic delight from it, the sublime...

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Jun 14, 2012

An artistic way with words

"Shoichi Ida, Prints (1941-2006)" focuses on works bequeathed to The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, by the artist's studio and family. Though mostly forgotten today, Ida could count among his acquaintances such renowned artists as modernist painter Robert Rauschenberg and minimalist sculptor Carl...

CULTURE / Art

Apr 27, 2012

Representing Japan at Art Kyoto

In the wake of the recently held Art Fair Tokyo, Kyoto is following up with its own alternative in Art Kyoto. Organizers will, however, eschew the international art fair model seen in Tokyo and do what Kyoto does best — represent Japan.

Japan Times

CULTURE / Art

Apr 27, 2012

Representing Japan at Art Kyoto

In the wake of the recently held Art Fair Tokyo, Kyoto is following up with its own alternative in Art Kyoto. Organizers will, however, eschew the international art fair model seen in Tokyo and do what Kyoto does best — represent Japan.

CULTURE / Art

Apr 26, 2012

Mavo, the movement that rocked Japan's art scene

In an Aug. 31, 1923, edition of the Shin-aichi newspaper, a clipping shows a photo of artists milling around paintings propped up against a tree in Tokyo's Ueno Park. Another image in the previous day's Asahi Graph shows a girl looking over an apparently abstract painting, above which is a label that...

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

Things may look perfect to the outside world, but today's mom is fine with some imperfection at home.

How 'Reiwa moms' are reshaping motherhood in Japan

By Mai Yoshikawa

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Vol. 35: Travel in time — and stay there

Vol. 35: Travel in time — and stay there

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