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CULTURE

Art

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Digital artist Polygon1993 revels in the physicality of nostalgic technology, making art out of materials such as miniature CDs, holographic prints layered with plexiglass shards and a giant custom-made floppy disk.

CULTURE / Art

Apr 8, 2025

Online art scene eager to go offline, at least for the moment

By Zoria Petkoska

From Beeple exhibiting a physical version of an NFT artwork to Polygon1993’s custom-made giant floppy disk, digital media artists are bringing their work into the physical world.

The city of Kurayoshi in Tottori Prefecture celebrated the opening of its public art museum with festivities such as a parade that drew 1,000 revelers.

CULTURE / Art

Apr 4, 2025

Tottori takes a bold leap forward in the arts

By Jennifer Pastore

The prefecture's new art museum aims to engage the community through interactive activities rather than merely showcasing boundary-pushing art.

The Tokyo National Museum’s garden is open to the public in springtime, when 10 different varieties of cherry trees are blooming.

CULTURE / Art

Mar 28, 2025

Cherry blossom-themed art to see this weekend in Tokyo

By Zoria Petkoska

With the cherry blossoms’ ephemeral beauty immortalized in art and literature for centuries, there's plenty of artworks to gaze upon on rainy days.

AMKK’s latest exhibition, “X-Ray Flowers,” is the culmination of seven years of work aided by CT technologists, who help with the highly specialized imaging techniques.

CULTURE / Art

Mar 21, 2025

Avant-garde botanists AMKK illuminate the inner worlds of flowers

By Kim Kahan

The punk florists' latest exhibition immerses visitors in darkness, bathed only in the glow of X-rays and CT scans of plants and flowers.

Artist Adrian Steckeweh 3-D prints otherworldly clothes and accessories for himself, in a way augmenting his reality with tangible objects.

CULTURE / Art

Mar 16, 2025

Augmented reality artist Omega C navigates a precarious scene for XR art

By Erik Augustin Palm

Just this year, XR art featured heavily in the digital art festival Dig Shibuya and is the focus of the ongoing “Machine Love” exhibition at Mori Art Museum.

Excerpts from Natsume Soseki’s “Ten Nights of Dreams” and footage of dancer Min Tanaka and "shō" player Mayumi Miyata play across three large screens that are reflected in a mirror-like pool of water in the installation “Time Time.”

CULTURE / Art

Mar 4, 2025

Crowds shouldn’t stop you from seeing the hit Ryuichi Sakamoto exhibit

By Thu-Huong Ha

Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo’s “Seeing Sound, Hearing Time” has far exceeded expected visitor numbers, but there could be an upside to the crowds.

Toyohara Kunichika experimented with established norms of composition and began spreading a single figure over three full sheets, as seen in this “Kabuki Play 'Kagamiyama Gonichi no Iwafuji'” triptych.

CULTURE / Art

Feb 15, 2025

Kunichika's vibrant ukiyo-e gets a chance to shine at anniversary exhibit

By Martin Laflamme

An underappreciated ukiyo-e master is the focus of the largest-ever retrospective of his work in Japan, marking the 190th anniversary of his birth.

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Visitors walk past Sou Fujimoto's Grand Ring, which has been recognized as the largest wooden structure in the world.

Can a World Expo still matter? Japan is about to find out.

By Tomoko Otake

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