Search - works

 
 
JAPAN
Nov 19, 2008

Tezuka — keeper of 'manga' flame

"Manga" comics are ubiquitous in Japan and have become one of the country's most powerful cultural exports worldwide.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Nov 13, 2008

Picasso: a man of many passions and muses

It's been said that Picasso changed style whenever he changed lovers. That may be an exaggeration, but when viewing the evolution of Picasso's art, it's easy to imagine the upheavals in his private life. Married twice and with four children by three women, the artist's lovers — Fernande Olivier, Olga...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 16, 2008

Mitsubishi touts young artists

Recent art-school graduate Yuzo Shimomura was looking as uncomfortable as the collar of his shirt, which had flared up above his jacket lapel. It was clear they both wanted to be somewhere else.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 4, 2008

'The Closed Garden'

Tokyo Gallery, Ginza
EDITORIALS
Aug 4, 2008

Tough budget environment

The Cabinet last week adopted the guideline for fiscal 2009 budgetary requests — at a time when tax revenues are expected to decline due to sluggish economic activities. This is a completely different picture from when the fiscal 2008 guideline was adopted. Therefore, budgetary negotiations will not...
Japan Times
Events / Events Outside Tokyo
Jul 18, 2008

30th Pia Film Festival opens

The 30th Pia Film Festival, Japan's largest and most influential independent movie event, kicks off July 19 in Shibuya, Tokyo, showcasing works by amateurs who could be the next greats of the film industry.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives
Jun 29, 2008

Christine Flint Sato: Inking her own mark

For Christine Flint Sato, the key to understanding her adopted homeland has been through the world of sumi-e, a Chinese style of water-ink painting adopted in Japan in the 14th century.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Apr 10, 2008

The making of a market center

Almost everything was sold before he even arrived at Art Fair Tokyo, but that didn't stop gallerist Peter Nagy from coming to Japan anyway. The impulse to dip his toes into what could become contemporary art's next deep pool was just too strong to resist, so three large canvases by artists Thukral &...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 17, 2008

Standing room for sale

A heady atmosphere of spending hung over the opening of this year's Art@Agnes, the "art fair in a hotel" that has in the last four years become a regular fixture of Tokyo's art world. Take 20 to 50 years off visitors' ages, strip them of their designer clothes and their well-polished courtesies, and...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Nov 15, 2007

Not in Beijing for the Chinese

Standing among the glamorously attired revelers celebrating the opening of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing this month, Tokyo art dealer Sueo Mizuma had to yell to make himself heard.
CULTURE / Art
Oct 18, 2007

Design meets art at 'Roppongi Crossing'

The world loves Japanese design. Because of this, Design Week, coming up next month, is arguably one of the most successful international events in Tokyo. By contrast, Tokyo Fashion Week and Tokyo International Film Festival hardly generate in those fields' fans the rabid excitement that the designers'...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 20, 2007

Traditional China popped

After the end of the Opium War in China in 1842, Shanghai opened itself to trade with the outside world. A little after that, the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-64, which took place in southern China and Nanjing, funneled into the metropolis artists and scholars seeking refuge.
Japan Times
LIFE / WEEK 3
Jul 15, 2007

Art's a beach!

The studio of potter Shigeaki Higuchi faces the Pacific on the coast at Shirahama in Minami Boso City. Between the shore and his modest atelier there's only a local road and a line of bushes where deep-blue morning glories were already in full bloom when I visited last month. The sky was clear and the...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jun 7, 2007

Subtlety and humor in American art

It's strange to go to China — in the midst of a contemporary-art boom, or bubble as could be feared — and encounter a stunning exhibition of American art. But that's what Shanghai's Museum of Contemporary Art is currently offering visitors.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 31, 2007

Photography now

The borderline between photojournalism and travel photography is hard to define.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 17, 2007

Creating atmospheres

An array of recent exhibitions in Kyoto and Osaka offers an engaging cross section of contemporary art practice in western Japan.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Apr 26, 2007

Take a peak inside Henry Darger's mind

Outsider artists often present a pathetic spectacle to the world: forgotten inmates of mental institutions; shuffling, muttering loners; or misfits, like Henry Darger, who spent his workdays as a low-paid janitor and his free time writing and illustrating an unpublishable 15,145-page novel about a vast...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Oct 26, 2006

Slow-motion revelations

A group of people who do not know one another, but are united in a common purpose -- possibly waiting for a bus -- stand together in a tightly cropped long shot. One is reading a book, another is listening to music through headphones. There are the young and old; whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians;...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 14, 2006

Allegations of plagiarism raised by kaleidoscope installation in Echigo-Tsumari

Picasso once said, "good artists copy, great artists steal." Of course, it has never been as simple as that. Questions concerning artistic authenticity, honest or dishonest intentions and outright plagiarism have been around ever since societies began to consider artistic expression the unique product...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jul 13, 2006

The accidental art collector: Unearthing the pure essence of Nature

The painters in your collection are commonly described simply as "Individualist." Can you elaborate on what is meant by that?
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jun 22, 2006

Public uncertainty, wobbly provocations

'I feel I have lost the ability to have a definite opinion, in terms of people, and about myself," says the Japanese installation artist Tabaimo. It is a surprising admission from someone who first received international acclaim for what were seen as perceptive and cutting social commentaries on modern...
Events / Events Outside Tokyo
Feb 17, 2006

Video fest screens winners

With Tokyo Video Festival 2006's screening week drawing to a close, Saturday, Feb. 18, marks award ceremony day, when the public will be able to view the festival's prize-winning videos and take part in a discussion.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Nov 3, 2005

Pushkin delivers the goods

It's no secret what the mainstream art public really like -- soft, flowery Impressionism and cute, colorful Post-impressionism, with, possibly, a smattering of Picassos and Matisses thrown in to add grit. Hold a show with this kind of art, and you'll have to hang the paintings high so that people can...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 20, 2005

Tagging in Mito galleries

"Street culture" and graffiti came into Japan around the 1990s, primarily as a fashion trend that accompanied the spread of hip-hop music and skateboarding. Traditionally, of course, it has grittier associations with American slums and ghettoes, where it became, at its most politically conscious, an...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jun 22, 2005

Breathing the life into the dance

"I had a hard time finding the title," Pina Bausch tells me during an interview about her most recent work, "Nefes." The Turkish for "Breath" is the title of the latest in a series of works which the choreographer, who will turn 65 in July this year, has created in collaboration with theaters around...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Apr 13, 2005

Kent Nagano conducts former collaborator Takemitsu

Kent Nagano is nothing if not a very busy man. The musical director of the Los Angeles Opera, the artistic director and chief conductor of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester, Berlin, and the guest director of many world-famous orchestras, the California native is in demand as one of the most popular opera...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / CERAMIC SCENE
Dec 22, 2004

Dreams for a perfectly set table come true

"Everybody sets out to do something, and everybody does something, but no one does what he sets out to do," said Irish author George Moore of the good intentions that abound in life. Setting an idea in motion is often more important than the end result, whether one creates products, ideas, or life itself....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Dec 22, 2004

An improviser of lines

When we hearken back to the revolutionary 1960s, a decade increasingly "remembered" by people who in fact weren't even alive at the time, the soundtrack that rings in our ears is, of course, rock 'n' roll.

Longform

Tetsuzo Shiraishi, speaking at The Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage, uses a thermos to explain how he experienced the U.S. firebombing of March 1945, when he was just 7 years old.
From ashes to high-rises: A survivor’s account of Tokyo’s postwar past