NEWSWORTHY
Left-field visions of Kyoto's rising artists
The Museum of Kyoto's latest exhibition presents a promising cast of 45 emerging local artists working in miscellaneous mediums from lacquer to small-scale mixed-media installations.
'Beyond the End: Ruins in Art History': What kind of beauty lies beneath ruins?
The exploration of the subject of ruins — their romanticization and fantasization — raises questions about the relationship between art, beauty and disaster.
Shinzo Fukuhara: Shiseido's patron of beauty
As an artist, Shinzo Fukuhara may not be a household name, but his production of a photography magazine, founding of the Shiseido Gallery and writings on aesthetics were seminal to the development of art photography in Japan.
Japan's artistic rebels of the 1980s
While nothing so much as an epochal rupture occurred, 1980s' artists in Japan were reactive to the lingering concerns of the '70s — in that decade, oil painting and sculpture were mostly passe, while modernism appeared exhausted.
Kichizaemon Raku reads between Wols' lines
Kichizaemon Raku, the eldest son of Kakunyu XIV, succeeded to the role as the 15th head of the revered Raku family of tea bowl craftsmen in 1981, a tradition founded in the Momoyama Period (1573-1603) by Tanaka Chojiro (d. 1592). His latest exhibition, "Raku ...
Duchamp and Japan: No rest for the urinal
If you want someone to blame for Banksy's stunt of shredding "Girl With Balloon" after selling it for $1.4 million at auction, your prime suspect currently has a major retrospective at the Tokyo National Museum. Skepticism of the British graffiti artist's aesthetic value may not ...
Kazuo Okada's all-star cast of Asian art
To celebrate its fifth anniversary, the Okada Museum of Art in Hakone is bringing out all its major works by the masters — from 16th- and 17th-century Rinpa painters Tawaraya Sotatsu and Ogata Korin to 18th- and 19th-century ukiyo-e artists Kitagawa Utamaro and Katsushika ...
In art, there are no rules, only new challenges
For the director of the Japan Society in New York, it was a teenage encounter with a Shoichi Ida print that led to her love of art and its international influence
Keiichi Tanaami's visually trippy past
Sometimes innocent, sometimes pornographic, influences percolated, exploded and re-formed in multiple and mutant ways during Keiichi Tanaami's career, which took off in the 1960s and is still going strong.
The painterly prayers of Higashiyama
Kaii Higashiyama's best-known works are often called "quintessentially Japanese landscapes," but they were also examples of the artist's conservative dialogue with European and American abstraction.
Indulging in post-apocalyptic nostalgia
With a theme of total annihilation and a techno-horror aesthetic, Hiroki Tsukuda's exhibition at Nanzuka sounds like it would be grim, but this isn't the work of a hopeless nihilist.
Kazunori Hamana: Simple vessels of complex self-reflection
Inspired by a love for the craftsmanship of traditional items, Kazunori Hamana abandoned his vintage clothing business in Tokyo to make clay tsubo jars that have since won him critical acclaim.
