For John L. Tran's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
The current exhibition at Archi-Depot, "A Gaze into Architecture: Phases of Contemporary Photography and Architecture" features the work of 13 artists, of whom more than half are Japanese. All the work is exceptional.
With a theme of total annihilation and a techno-horror aesthetic, Hiroki Tsukuda's exhibition at Nanzuka sounds like it would be grim, but this isn't the work of a hopeless nihilist.
Where Flemish still-life painters combined fruit, vegetables and flowers that could not normally be picked in the same season, and portrayed them together in an imaginary, but highly realistic pictorial space, Kosemura uses contemporary tools to achieve the same with photographic detail.
While Japan's historical sakoku period of isolation may have limited any contact it had with Sweden what did transpire between the two nations is of historical, scientific and artistic importance.
Bertrand Lavier seems to relish messing with our cognitive dissonance. As the self-taught artist, who originally studied horticulture, put it in a 2016 interview, "Art is a matter of paradoxes on nearly every level."
"I photograph landscape like it's skin" — artist Masako Kakizaki on her "Aonoymous: Full Circle" project
Repurposing old buildings to show art is becoming increasingly mainstream in Japan, but the route by which Koichiro Osaka ended up creating the Asakusa gallery has been circuitous, and an odd mix of chance and determination.
A very concise review of the Bridget Riley exhibition at the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, would be this: Barring those who are prone to motion sickness, go and see it. This applies equally to predisposed art buffs who already know and appreciate ...
Ten years after the HMT Empire Windrush brought Britain's first major influx of West Indian immigrants to the United Kingdom, and 10 years before Conservative MP Enoch Powell made his famously inflammatory speech predicting "rivers of blood" if Britain allowed mass migration, a fictional ...
Tomoo Gokita's deformations of his subjects are surrealistic with a precision mix of austere black, white and grays, low-brow culture imagery, kookiness and powerfully evocative draftsmanship.
