Zaim is dirty. The floor is scuffed, the windows old, the building a strange maze of rooms with low ceilings. Compared to the slick show on a couple blocks away at this year's Yokohama Triennale, the exhibition space that used to be a government ...
Gallery Hashimoto Closes Sept. 27 This past weekend, the 11th version of Geisai, Takashi Murakami's art spectacle, attracted nearly 1,000 young artists who assembled their own stalls in Odaiba's Tokyo Big Sight, home of the similar DesignFesta. While there was a lot to see, and ...
Niigata grannies munching on bento lunch boxes, tattooed Tokyo roughnecks pounding beers, an ex-military man in from London with two Shanghaiese kung-fu sisters: taiko (Japanese drum) troupe Kodo's annual Earth Celebration on Sado Island this past weekend drew an eclectic crowd. This year the biggest ...
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo Closes Sept. 28 Someone recently told me they find it hard to think in the Tokyo summer heat. In the cool of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo's current exhibition, "Parallel Worlds," they won't have to while perusing this light show ...
After last year's all-star lineup for Earth Celebration's 20th birthday, this year taiko drumming troupe Kodo mark the 100th anniversary of Japanese immigration to Brazil by inviting Olodum from the Brazilian state of Bahia to headline. An Afro-Brazilian culture group, Olodum started out in ...
Last month in his ongoing series Japanese Cinema Eclectics, author Donald Ritchie screened "Horrors of Malformed Men" (Toei, 1969). An "unsung classic" of Japanese film, "Horrors" features the only cinematic performance of Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of the butoh dance movement. Hijikata, who would ...
Tokyo's multifaceted gallery scene usually slows down a bit in the summer, so May has seen a whack of openings across the city. At Nichido Contemporary Art ( www.nca-g.com ) in Chuo Ward's Hatchobori, critic and writer Kentaro Ichihara has curated a show loosely ...
In a small studio in Kichijoji, a director is telling three dancers that their heads are potatoes rolling around on a plate. And their three bald pates, poking up through a single piece of cardboard that holds them together, certainly have the appearance of ...
Ever since 1917, when Marcel Duchamp submitted a urinal to the Society of Independent Artists' exhibition, arguing that it was art, anything has become acceptable. Artist Chris Burden shot himself in the arm in a Los Angeles gallery in 1971; Piero Manzoni canned what ...
Something for everyone — that seems to be the motto for the new Towada Art Center in Aomori Prefecture. With cash in hand and a desire to see their town turn around, Towada has banked on art as a way to bring back vitality ...
