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Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jun 9, 2011

Portrait of an artist or photographer?

For Takashi Homma, being a contemporary photographer is very different from being a photographer.
COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT
May 29, 2011

Japanese genius shines eclectic in its extravagant simplicities of style

"Live your era, surmount your era!" With these words, written in 1935, the young woodblock artist Yoshio Fujimaki gave out a cry for genius. Certainly his words apply to the genius of Bob Dylan (whose 70th birthday was celebrated on these pages last week), since both he, Fujimaki and others of genius...
EDITORIALS
May 15, 2011

Japan's rich heritage

At long last, Japan received a bit of bright news May 7, when it was announced that two sites in Japan, the historic Hiraizumi area in Iwate Prefecture and the Ogasawara Islands some 1,000 km south of Tokyo, were almost certain to be designated as World Heritage Sites at meetings next month of the UNESCO...
Japan Times
LIFE / Digital / TECH_JAPAN
May 11, 2011

This summer, cute animal gizmos will make 'cool biz' even cooler

Summer is just around the corner, and office workers are starting to don their lighter "cool biz" clothing in order to beat the heat. Japanese gadget-maker Cube Works (you may know them from the infamous humping dog USB stick) has rolled out a series of cute little fans to help you stay chilled.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 5, 2011

From within the 'outsider' came a wealth of imagination

"American Innocence, Welcome To The Realms of the Unreal" at the Laforet Museum brings together 64 paintings and some personal objects of the "outsider artist" Henry Darger, who was born in Chicago in 1892.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Apr 15, 2011

It's a fine line between the eccentric and the experimental

Implicit in the idea of the "eccentric" painter is that the artist's style seems to have come out of nowhere, breaks all the conventions, and stands alone as an example of unparalleled individuality that cannot be repeated. All the better if the painter's biography is incomplete and prone to hyperbolic...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Apr 8, 2011

'Paul Klee: Art in the Making 1883-1940'

The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto
Japan Times
Events / Events Outside Tokyo
Mar 18, 2011

Ceramics fair dishes up gold

Looking for your new favorite cup or dish? You could find something just right at Ceramics and Porcelain Fair 2011 in Fukuoka.
CULTURE / Japan Pulse
Feb 25, 2011

Techno Shugei weaves craft into circuitry

Homespun crafts and ingenuity meet DIY electronics and kawaii geekery in techno shugei.
Japan Times
Events / Events Outside Tokyo
Feb 18, 2011

Art under a Roppongi roof

Tokyo is headed into "art season" with the Tokyo Frontline and G-tokyo art fairs preparing to start. Along with those events, a new gallery complex will open its doors to art lovers on Feb. 18.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Feb 18, 2011

Visit Tokyo's 'Frontline' for Japan's contemporary art

Shigeo Goto, director of Tokyo Frontline, a new art fair to start in Tokyo this year, calls himself an "outsider," meaning he considers himself not quite inside Tokyo's commercial "art scene."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Feb 11, 2011

Playwright Noda asks, 'What is a Japanese?'

In the early 1980s, when he was a student at the University of Tokyo, Hideki Noda began to emerge as a standard bearer of something new in Japan: Contemporary theater by — and for — young people seeking to change their country.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Feb 4, 2011

A tricky postscript on the art of abstraction

Gauging Torawo Nakagawa's art in "postscript" at Kyoto's Kodama Gallery is no easy undertaking. His paintings resist narrative cohesion and cultivate a certain hermeticism, all the while preserving an attractive visual dimension. Concerned as he is with a distinctive process of painting — a style founded...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 21, 2011

'Why is it Masterwork?'

Bridgestone Museum of Art
EDITORIALS
Dec 18, 2010

Freedom of expression under fire

In June, the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly voted down a bill that stipulated that manga and anime must be sold in the "adult corner" of stores if they "recklessly" and "positively" depict sexual activities of characters presumed to be 18 years old or younger in a manner thought to hamper children's judgment...
JAPAN / Media
Nov 14, 2010

Documenting the art world's original odd couple

"No! You do it!" yells Dorothy across a small New York apartment to her husband, Herb. Megumi Sasaki, a Japanese film director, has just asked to take a peek at a priceless artwork from the 1960s that is covered in blankets.
BUSINESS / YEN FOR LIVING
Oct 24, 2010

Flood control: Destroying neighborhoods to save them

If there was ever an example of government overspending, the long-term flood control project involving super-levees would be it.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 15, 2010

Breaking old conventions to find the new

Ryota Aoki (b.1978) says that he wants to see things that never before existed in ceramics. Personally, too, he is the exemplification of that ethos. We do not usually expect a celebrated ceramicist to be wearing a turban, have both ears pierced and be listening to hip-hop in the background as he sits...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Stage
Oct 1, 2010

The Australian Ballet, en pointe in Japan

After the death of the founder of Ballet Russes (Russian Ballet), Sergei Diaghilev, in 1929, the original company — which during its short history included esteemed dancers such as Vaslav Nijinsky and Anna Pavlova and collaborators like Pablo Picasso and Igor Stravinsky — dispersed to establish other...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 24, 2010

Women of quiet strength

Female artists play a significant role in Japan's art world today, but a century ago, only a few women made a mark in the then male-dominated field. Shoen Uemura stands out as one of the most successful, a status she earned through the relentless study and perfection of her chosen theme of bijin-ga —...
Japan Times
JAPAN / EXPLAINER
Sep 7, 2010

Anime makes Japan a cultural superpower

Japan may be on a slow decline as far as being a global economic force, but the "soft power" of its modern entertainment genres, from manga to "anime," has global appeal, especially among young people.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 3, 2010

Contemporary ceramics update the tea ceremony

The Way of Tea has for centuries been a cornerstone of Japanese culture and aesthetic beauty. An old Japanese proverb states: "If a man has no tea in him, he is incapable of understanding truth and beauty."
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / BACKSTREET STORIES
Jul 25, 2010

Brilliant facets of Nishi-Ojima

Setting off to explore Nishi-Ojima (West Large Island) and Kita Suna (North Sand) in Tokyo's downtown Koto Ward, I know better than to expect a seaside resort.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / CLOSE-UP
Jul 4, 2010

Manga's Cinderella story

"I want to tell you a real love story," whispers a pen-wielding Misako, a graphic-novel version of comic artist Misako Takashima, on the first page of the 2007 book, "Rock and Roll Love."
Japan Times
LIFE / Travel / BACKSTREET STORIES
Jun 27, 2010

Cool (old) Japan flourishes along flowing rivers of Edo

In blistering midday heat, traffic blasts by, spitting out exhaust and grit at the busy intersection of Yotsume and Shin Ohashi Avenues. I've exited Sumiyoshi Station on the Toei Shinjuku Line, eager to find Sarue Onshi Park, said to be pretty with streams and water features. About to produce a water...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 7, 2010

The accessories that fanned the flames of screen painting

Given the relative dearth of fan-painting exhibitions, it seems a relatively minor art commensurate with its small-scale format. In reality, it was the most abundantly produced kind of painting in Japan for many centuries, giving birth, or at least standing as precursor, to the large-scale golden screen...
Japan Times
LIFE / WEEK 3
Apr 18, 2010

Artist and architect rethink the condo

Drab, repetitive, formulaic, plain: some of the more polite adjectives that might be applied to most condominium design in Japan.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Apr 9, 2010

The blond ambition of Tamara de Lempicka

I'm not sure what Lady Gaga — who arrives in Japan shortly — has in her art collection, but given time (and the millions produced by her phenomenal success) I think it is highly likely that a lady of her strong aesthetic drives will get round to emulating her model Madonna by acquiring paintings...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Feb 26, 2010

New dimensions in a chain

What makes the exhibition in two stages of Yoshio Kitayama's works at the MEM gallery in Osaka all the more surprising is that they are paintings — not the sculpture/installations for which the artist is conventionally known.

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