There are more than a few Japanese artists these days who use what might be termed "obsessional" techniques to realize their work. Among the better known are Yayoi Kusama, who once glued thousands of postal airmail stickers to a canvas and who is best known for the ceaseless repetition in her "Infinity Net" and polka-dot paintings; and Makoto Sasaki, whose hand-drawn heartbeat pieces are a blip-like record, in red pen on long rolls of paper, of his own heartbeat, monitored by stethoscope over periods of several days. There is a scratch-your-head-in-awe quality to art born of incredible discipline, to works that obviously took a great deal of time and patience to make.
One of my favorites in this bizarre little subgenre of contemporary art is Nobuhiko Nukata, an Osaka painter who, for the last 15 years or so, has been using only his hand and a brush (no rulers, no masking tape) to create large geometric pictures which -- at first glance, anyway -- look very much like they were done either on a drafting table or a computer.
Nukata, 38, is now in Tokyo with "Hypothesis' Coming," a two-gallery show that brings together, for the first time, selections from his three principal bodies of work: his popular grid-like "Jungle Gym" paintings; the new "Reel" series; and his airy "Room" pictures.