Tetsu Fusen (1891-1976) was regarded as an unusual though gifted painter in his own time. In the decades since, however, he has largely been forgotten, mostly known to specialists or devoted connoisseurs of his technically brilliant, imaginative and emotional landscapes. Much of his work was at least semi-autobiographical, filled with memories ...
Celebrated domestically and internationally for tea ceremony caddies in lacquer and mother-of-pearl inlay, as well as rather more substantial fittings such as kimono display hangers, artisan Tatsuaki Kuroda (1904-82) has finally been honored with the first Kyoto retrospective exhibition of his work. The exhibition focuses ...
Koji Kinutani's entire career — from his student work to his metaphysical portraiture, which inaugurated a manga trend in contemporary art; his Styrofoam sculptures; the "Goddess of the Silvery Peak" (the basis for the official 1998 Nagano Winter Olympic Games poster); and his sometimes ...
Tobias Klein's "Augmented Mask," an installation that incorporates an elaborate 3-D printed mask, colorful projection mapping, a virtual reality headset and references a popular Chinese opera, looks a lot like future art as imagined in science fiction. Appearing at the small The Container venue in ...
An interactive art collective wants us all to connect and experience a world without boundaries.
Terror and tragedy are widely considered entirely disagreeable in principle. But audiences have for millennia taken pleasure in the pain of narrative spectacles in the arts. Fear is popular because it arouses curiosity in addition to revulsion. So, too, does the assemblage of Western ...
As Akiko Miki, one of the three curators of this year's Yokohama Triennale, tries to wrap up a roundtable discussion titled "The Connecting World and the Isolating World" at the Yokohama Museum of Art, a question is shouted out from the back of the ...
Popularly known as Genshin (942-1017), the high-ranking Buddhist prelate Eshin Sozu was said to have been born following his devout mother's prayers to the Kannon of Takaoji Temple in Taima, Nara Prefecture. Genshin began the road to monkhood in youth, studying at Kyoto's Enryakuji Temple ...
Every photo has a story to tell, and the eldest son of Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara is hoping that the photographs taken by his father will give people a fuller view of his life. An exhibition starting in Tokyo next Wednesday will showcase ...
The natural beauty of flowers has inspired artists for centuries, but for American nature photographer Terri Weifenbach, flowers have given rise to reflection on the cycle of life. In the spring of 2015, a garden near the slopes of Mount Fuji at Izu Photo Museum ...
Diabolic torture inflicted on the ungodly; unspeakable yearnings straight out of the subconscious — the country now known as Belgium has given the world over five centuries' worth of depictions of the unimaginable. "Fantastic Art in Belgium" at The Bunkamura Museum of Art places Hieronymus ...
A few years ago, at the press conference for Taiwanese artist Lee Mingwei's solo show at the Mori Art Museum (MAM), Fumio Nanjo, the museum director, talked about the direction the museum would be taking from then on; they were no longer so interested ...
Hybridity and eclecticism may be key concepts in much contemporary art, yet they are not new phenomena. In the Taisho Era (1912-1926), Tetsugoro Yorozu virtually personified the idea of hybrid art: As Japan rushed toward modernization, he not only experimented with the very latest ...
