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Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 4, 2013

Japanese collectors take a conceptual turn

Echoing the choice of Koki Tanaka — a conceptual artist — for the Japanese pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale this year, "Why Not Live For Art? II: 9 collectors reveal their treasures" at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery suggests that art collecting in Japan has taken a conceptual turn.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Aug 3, 2013

Revealing the landscaped gems of North America

North America is not a land mass one immediately associates with gardens. China, Japan, Britain and France, perhaps, lay claim to the mind's strongest landscape associations.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jul 17, 2013

The different brush strokes of Tani Buncho

The latest exhibition at the Suntory Museum of Art commemorates the 250th anniversary of the birth of Tani Buncho — a painter, connoisseur and art historian of formidable energy and with an insatiable drive for knowledge. Of samurai lineage, Buncho underwent foundational art training in Kano School...
Japan Times
LIFE / Style & Design
Jun 18, 2013

The 'Sunny' side of Taiyo Matsumoto

The Toronto Comics Arts Festival, which celebrated its 10th anniversary this year, has of late made its name bringing over cutting-edge Japanese artists for signings, live drawing sessions and speaking events. The atmosphere at this year's event, held in May, in many ways like an independent film festival,...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 23, 2013

Sometimes it's hard for Leonardo to impress

The reputation of Leonardo da Vinci is like an inverted pyramid — a massive, impressive structure that can draw a vast audience, but stands on an extremely narrow base. Although regarded as one of the "Big Three" artists of the Renaissance — along with Michelangelo and Raphael — the paintings on...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 23, 2013

Finding an artistic home for fashion

Almost everything in the room is transparent. From the ceiling dangle two clear plastic jackets. Against the glass walls are empty glass display cases. Past the jackets on the opposite side of the room are four flat-screen TVs set to static.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 9, 2013

Replaying people's actions with a twist

Much of Belgian artist Francis Alu00ffs' work and life have been determined by chance.
Japan Times
ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH
Apr 21, 2013

Nature art: It's in the 'I' of the beholder

When a thing of beauty is perceived, the observer experiences some kind of a reaction; but what defines “beauty”? Is it art?
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Apr 4, 2013

Rubens' best work is collaborative

The 17th-century Flemish baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens is a great historical painter, not because of the scenes from ancient Roman history that he sometimes painted, but because, when we encounter his works, we find ourselves trying to understand what kind of society could possibly have produced art...
Japan Times
WORLD / Crime & Legal
Mar 25, 2013

U.S. gun deaths — and tougher laws — shaped by race

Gun deaths are shaped by race in the United States: Whites are far more likely to shoot themselves, and blacks are far more likely to be shot by someone else.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Mar 7, 2013

Such sweet strokes of the Impressionists

A horde of Renoirs and other works from the high-water mark of Impressionism have descended on Tokyo — rampaging in their quiet, colorful way through the labyrinthine exhibition spaces of Tokyo's Mitsubishi Ichigokan.
Japan Times
Events / Events In Tokyo
Feb 22, 2013

'Grotesque' organist hits town

Organist Cameron Carpenter, known for his wild performances and appearance, plays the organ like no one else — hitting the keys with frantic energy and a rockstar-like attitude.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Music
Feb 14, 2013

Pianist Yazawa looks to the past to find security in the future

Pianist Tomoko Yazawa always thinks about her music with the future in mind. However, for her latest album, "Playing in the Dark," she made a rare diversion into the past — specifically, France at the end of the 19th century.
BUSINESS / Economy / ANALYSIS
Jan 29, 2013

Guarded optimism for debt-raising budget

Cabinet members are looking to the bright side, stressing that issuance of government bonds in fiscal 2013 won't exceed tax income for the first time in four years.
EDITORIALS
Jan 24, 2013

Discovered while still alive

Natsuko Kuroda, 75, the oldest person yet to win the literary Akutagawa Prize, expressed appreciation that jurors discovered her 'while I am alive.'
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 23, 2013

The art and poetics of a domestic environment

Jaws dropped as American filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, arriving in Japan in the 1980s, named Yasujiro Ozu as one of the directors he was most inspired by. Ozu, active from the 1920s up to the 1960s, was then considered old fashioned for his slow pace and lack of movement, and for the middle-class sensibilities...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 17, 2013

Hakuin: The sight of one hand clapping

Most people know the famous riddle, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Many are also aware that it is connected with Zen Buddhism, and some will even know that it is a famous koan by the 18th-century monk Hakuin.
EDITORIALS
Jan 16, 2013

Stimulus package alert

The Abe Cabinet on Friday endorsed an emergency economic stimulus package designed to buoy the sagging economy. It is only second in size to the one adopted after the Lehman Brothers shock in the fall of 2008. Government spending will reach ¥10.3 trillion. If spending by local governments and the private...
EDITORIALS
Jan 15, 2013

Stimulus package alert

The Abe Cabinet on Friday endorsed an emergency economic stimulus package designed to buoy the sagging economy. It is only second in size to the one adopted after the Lehman Brothers shock in the fall of 2008. Government spending will reach ¥10.3 trillion. If spending by local governments and the private...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 10, 2013

Situations that end up spoiling the artistic landscape

Imagine you went to a movie theatre that insisted on doing anything other than showing you an actual movie, or to a restaurant where the waiter did all he could to stop you having an actual meal. This is a situation I sometimes find myself in when visiting art museums, especially if it is a show of contemporary...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 3, 2013

Western influences on Suda's nostalgic East

The fusion of East and West is a major theme in 20th-century art, even though, in important ways, the two don't mix. What seems at one point to be their ostensible unification, appears in another as discordant. Such inconsonance lurks in the background at the retrospective of Kunitaro Suda's work at...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Dec 13, 2012

Nature that goes beyond its course

The easiest way to describe this exhibition is "The meeting of two Mets," with the Metropolitan Museum of Art Tokyo serving as a venue for 133 works from its much more renowned New York version, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, known simply as "The Met."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Dec 6, 2012

What lies behind Ben Shahn's lines of the times

When an artist feels compelled to incorporate words and poetry into many of his artworks, we get a sense that he may have taken up the wrong profession. This feeling of being unsettled in his art is something that comes up again and again with the career of the left-wing 20th-century American artist...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Oct 18, 2012

Kentaro makes hip-hop personal

Almost the whole of Kentaro's life has been devoted to dance — in particular to hip-hop dance — ever since he first saw it on television as an elementary school boy.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 6, 2012

Fanning the flames of art

Shingo Tanaka (b. 1983) has installed his panels so seamlessly into Kyoto's eN arts gallery that the works first appear to be done on the walls. Though having trained as an oil painter, the soft scumblings and wisps of smoke and licks of fire in a restricted palette of black and ochres on white background,...
COMMENTARY / World
Jul 19, 2012

Marx: the return of the giant

If an author's eternal youth consists of his capacity to keep stimulating new ideas, then it may be said that Karl Marx has without question remained young.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Jul 12, 2012

Public theater takes on a leading role

Once upon a time, Japanese contemporary theater shared the limelight with youth-cultural movements that were rocking the nation. Back then, in the late 1960s and '70s, the avant-garde works of the angura (underground) theater scene had such an affinity with the radical student movement that they often...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jun 22, 2012

Politics is inescapable at 'Arab Express' exhibition

The Arab Spring may not be all it's cracked up to be. There are clearly problems with a large swath of nations, formerly under various forms of authoritarian regimes, switching relatively quickly to "democracy," at least as it is understood in the West.
Japan Times
BUSINESS
Jun 15, 2012

Smartphone toys come to the fore

The International Tokyo Toy Show kicked off Thursday with an unmistakable message that toy makers don't want to miss out on the smartphone boom.

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