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April 29, 2024
 

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NEW ART SEEN

Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
May 1, 2002
Young artists are making a splash
The third installment in an almost-annual series (they skipped it last year), "New Media New Face 02" is now showing at the NTT InterCommunication Center, in Shinjuku. The work here, from four Japanese artists, falls into the vague but trendy, technology-based genre known as "media art."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Apr 17, 2002
Into the woods today: mourning nature's demise
Japanese cultural life has long revolved around the changing of the seasons, in particular, and nature, in general. Or has it? The differences between Japanese sensibilities toward nature and those generally held by Westerners have been much discussed. Yet it is interesting to note that, when used to indicate nature, the word shizen is something of a neologism, first employed in the early 19th century to express the meaning of the Dutch natuur. Before then, Japanese tended to use only specific terms for particular natural phenomena.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Apr 10, 2002
Gallery grazing perfect for a spring day
After visiting the Ginza galleries Saturday afternoon, I found myself unable to decide which of a number of good shows to feature in my column this week. So, instead of zooming in on a particular exhibition, allow me to present an overview.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Apr 3, 2002
In the realms of the spirits
"Ghosts, we hope, may be always with us -- that is, never too far out of the reach of fancy." So wrote British novelist Elizabeth Bowen in the preface to her "Second Ghost Book," published in 1952.
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Mar 27, 2002
Putting a 'gloss' on exhibitions
A computer-geek friend of mine recently posed an interesting problem to me: "If you wanted to save a document so that it was easily accessible 100 years from now, what format would you use?"
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Mar 20, 2002
VOCA roundup is a right royal letdown
It's been almost 100 years since Wassily Kandinsky began creating what are generally regarded as the first purely abstract paintings. The Russian's "compositions," as he termed them, freed him from representation and opened up a new world of expressive possibilities. These were fully explored in the 1950s by the painters of the New York School (Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and others).
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Mar 13, 2002
Electric Town project tunes into public art
Typically, from the moment Tokyoites step out the front door, they are subjected to an unrelenting barrage of visual and aural advertising. I've never seen a city that even comes close: Down the street from my place in Kabukicho, squeezed in between the neon signs of a sex club and the golden arches of a fast-food restaurant, are a couple of wall-mounted megaphones. While one shrieks about bodies, the other shrieks about burgers. Meanwhile a tower of light running up alongside the building promotes everything from ice cream to schoolgirl "massages."
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Mar 6, 2002
Getting back to the beginning
How I love to drift off to sleep in cars and on trains. But invariably, when they stop, I wake up. Someone once told me that the reason moving cars and trains are so soporific is because they subconsciously remind us of the time we spent inside our first-ever mode of transport, which was, of course, our mother.
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Feb 27, 2002
Hanayo and Tenko: through a lens blurrily
Cocky, irreverant and devil-may-care, invariably to be found surrounded by admirers as he holds forth from behind a big fat cigar, the Neo-Pop painter Takashi Murakami has for the last few years been one of Japan's leading international art stars.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Feb 20, 2002
Views from a place you've been before
It's always a pleasure to discover an exhibition space in Tokyo that you've never been to before, especially during these difficult economic times when old favorites are closing down. My latest find is Gallery Senkukan, tucked into a tiny Yoyogi side street, which opened a little more than a year ago.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Feb 14, 2002
Art appreciation as commodity fetishism
For the next three months, the Tokyo Opera City Gallery is devoting its large exhibition space to "JAM: Tokyo-London." Born of a cross-cultural happening in England in 1996, this second installment of JAM focuses on art, fashion and music. Premiered at the Barbican Gallery in London last summer and now transported to Tokyo, this incarnation features work in a wide variety of mostly new media by more than 40 young artists and artists' groups from or based in England and Japan.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Feb 6, 2002
Color her beautiful
"Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways." So wrote Oscar Wilde in "The Critic as Artist." There are myriad theories on why and how different wavelengths in the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum affect us in the ways they do -- some are scientific, others more fanciful. For her part, Ruriko Murayama prefers to focus on what she calls the "experience of color."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Jan 30, 2002
Prizewinner who's passing on the torch
When I mentioned in a column last year that Lee U Fan had won the Japanese Art Association's Praemium Imperiale award for painting, this provoked a number of questions from readers.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Jan 23, 2002
3-D fantasies with a 1-D feel
The biggest event on the capital's contemporary art circuit this week was undoubtedly the opening of Mariko Mori's "Pure Land" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. The fact that more than a few people were calling this exhibition a "retrospective" hints at how artspeak is changing, as the oldest work in the show dates back barely seven years.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Jan 16, 2002
Tales of innocence and odd experience
Through the opening party crowd ran Sam Taylor-Wood's adorable little daughter, Angelica, done up in a fairy costume with a papier-ma^che star floating above her head and a magic wand in her hand. It was a delightful moment that sent a ripple of good old warm-hearted smiles through the well-attended reception for Taylor-Wood's photography exhibition, "To Be or Not to Be," which is now at Ginza's Shiseido Gallery.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Jan 9, 2002
The next best thing
Happy New Year to one and all. I'm just back in Tokyo after spending the holidays in Bangkok, where, you might be interested to know, Project 304, About Art Space and the city's four or five other contemporary-art players got together to celebrate the finale of a successful video and film program that ran through December.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Dec 26, 2001
Best of times, worst of times
The ominous statistics had been news for some time, but, being a slippery freelancer, I never thought Japan's worsening economic situation would affect me directly. The year 2001, however, proved this assumption wrong, as the mean old cutback beast reared up and hit me where it hurt the most -- right in the opening party buffet.
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Dec 19, 2001
Great coffee with some art on the side
I took a visiting young German painter to Ben's Cafe in Takadanobaba the other day. We met to have a beer and a chat -- and because Jorn was eager to show me a book of his new work, with an eye to me maybe helping arrange a show for him.
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Dec 5, 2001
Handcrafted art to turn your head
There are more than a few Japanese artists these days who use what might be termed "obsessional" techniques to realize their work. Among the better known are Yayoi Kusama, who once glued thousands of postal airmail stickers to a canvas and who is best known for the ceaseless repetition in her "Infinity Net" and polka-dot paintings; and Makoto Sasaki, whose hand-drawn heartbeat pieces are a blip-like record, in red pen on long rolls of paper, of his own heartbeat, monitored by stethoscope over periods of several days. There is a scratch-your-head-in-awe quality to art born of incredible discipline, to works that obviously took a great deal of time and patience to make.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art / NEW ART SEEN
Nov 28, 2001
A new world order revealed
Start with a simple idea, add a slide projector and a turntable, and you have the pleasantly surprising Nicolas Moulin installation, "Pole."
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JAL cancels international flight after captain gets drunk at Dallas hotel
A Japan Airlines' flight from Dallas to Tokyo was canceled last week after its captain got drunk at a local hotel.
In Japan, regional revitalization fails to halt population decline
Sakiyama elementary school in Tamba, Hyogo Prefecture, in March .Over the past decade, the government has directed efforts toward policies designed to give young people incentives to base themselves in rural areas.
Putin’s war will soon reach Russians’ tax bills
Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a meeting in St. Petersburg on Friday.
Climate change, chalky grains and the risks for Japan’s rice farmers
A farmer plants seedlings in Satsumasendai, Kagoshima Prefecture. Japan’s self sufficiency rate for rice is nearly 100%, compared with 38% for food overall, on a calorie basis.
Japan wants you to spend more with ‘luxury tourism’
Performers play a traditional drum unique to Wajima, Ishikawa Prefecture, in the prefectural capital of Kanazawa on March 16 to mark the extension of the Hokuriku Shinkansen line to Tsuruga Station in Fukui Prefecture.
Theaster Gates’ ambitious ‘Afro-Mingei’ brings Black Chicago to Tokyo
Theaster Gates' “A Heavenly Chord” lines up church pews before seven speakers and a Hammond B3 organ, a type of electric organ prevalent in Black American churches.
Casa del Cibo: A thriving jewel born from Tohoku’s harsh past
When chef Ryohei Ikemi moved to Hachinohe, Aomori Prefecture, and opened Casa del Cibo in 2011, it was the first proper Italian restaurant in the city.
Town to block view of Mount Fuji in response to overtourism
The town government of Fujikawaguchiko, Yamanashi Prefecture, decided to set up a 2.5-meter-high screen to prevent tourists from taking pictures of Mount Fuji looming behind a convenience store.

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