As a professor of art and design, Yuko Kikuchi has some surprising things to say about mingei (Japanese folk art).

As the taboo-busting comic Joan Rivers used to say after pressing her audience's buttons, "Can we talk?" On the evidence of this year's Aichi Triennale, if it's about World War II atrocities, the answer seems to be "no."

For Yukinori Yanagi, whose work from the late '80s and '90s featured ants burrowing through national flags made of sand, nature is not synonymous with an anthropomorphically friendly "harmony" or "balance"; it's disruption, chaos, decay and metastasis.

Taking an elective course on photography while studying business in California changed the whole course of Yoshi Shimizu's career.

A documentary tells the story of Yayoi Kusama's battles with racism, sexism and mental illness during her 70-plus years of creating art.

Compared to exhibitions in which art objects are meant to seduce us into epiphanic transcendence, the works in "Surface and Custom," a group show at Shiseido Gallery organized by Berlin-based artists Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, are more akin to frank expositions about ...

Papersky's Tour de Nippon project combines cycling with other activities, such as gastronomy, hiking and craft workshops.

Shifting from a background in political science to studying languages and then training as a chef, Sekine says he only serves a menu degustation at his Paris restaurant Dersou because, "I want to be free, actually ... from everything."

Same-sex relationships, American bases in Okinawa, globalization, the Olympics, the atomic bomb, national identity, the exploitation of natural resources — "Image Narratives: Literature in Japanese Contemporary Art" at The National Art Center, Tokyo, does not lack for hot button topics.

The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum exhibition "The Time of Photography" starts with kitsch late 19th-century Yokohama shashin — hand-colored photos of Japanese scenes for sale to foreigners — and ends with the evanescence of Rinko Kawauchi's photography of everyday life made poetic through the ...