Tomokazu Matsuyama
November 21st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
I have an awful lot of catching up to do, so the next couple of posts will be short. Tomo Matsuyama’s show at Joshua Liner Gallery closed in October, but was a great collection of new work, showcasing not just paintings and drawings but sculptural and installation motifs as well.
Tomo’s work is a great hybrid of both traditional Japanese themes and contemporary urban style. Often one will come across a large canvases with a feel of historical narratives, such as horsemen in battle, but using bright neon colors with built-up layers of paint. There is a dynamic looseness to the work even though the compositions are tightly constructed. Tomo also creates murals, and is influenced by street art, and some of the scale and levity of these pursuits can be seen in these works, especially the small works on paper he had on display here.
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Additional installation images and information can be found on the Joshua Liner site.
Tatsuo Miyajima
August 9th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing recently opened an exhibition of Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima. I have long been a fan of Miyajima’s work and installations. While the artist confines himself to working exclusively with small LED number panels, he has been able to display them in vastly different and beautiful ways.
The LEDs hold universal meanings to the artist and his work, but are also used to touch on larger subjects with each installation. The artist only uses 1 through 9, and 9 through 1, because of the powerful void that 0 represents. There are Zen Buddhist undertones to the work, as numbers come into and leave existence, turning on and off, working alone and together. Sometimes they work in sync and sometimes together. Sometimes they are installed on walls or columns, and sometimes they drift down rivers, or ride the backs of small robots. In all of these situations, the numbers are representing as much as they are acting, as a symbol of the cycle of life, and as totems for our personal experiences in Life.
UCCA’s show is titled “Ashes to Ashes and Dust to Dust”, which adroitly continues this theme. It contains three large works. MEGA DEATH presents us with a room filled with blue LEDs that twink on and off, representing the estimated number of victims of the 20th Century’s wars, violet struggles and pogroms. The number (which is 167,000,000) transforms from abstract calculation to human loss when all 2,400 LEDs go blank at once, leaving the viewers standing in the dark, standing in Zero. HOTO is a colorful tower that houses the LEDs in a reflective material. The individuality and colors of the numbers is met with the viewer’s own reflection, and the distorted reflections of other viewers, adding a dazzling worldliness to each viewers sense of self. Floating Time displays numbers floating and flying through (what appear to be) LCD screens set in Simon Says colors. Here again ideas of transience and collective anonymity entice the viewer into quiet and sublime meditation.
The exhibition is open through October 8th.
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All artworks are copyright Tatsuo Miyajima. All images were borrowed from the UCCA website. The artist’s personal website can be found here.
Ryoji Ikeda
May 28th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Ryoji Ikeda’s The Transfinite is an amazing installation that is on view in the 67th Street Armory through June 11th. Centered in the vast and darkened drill hall, Ikeda’s creation is the kind of artwork that really has to be experienced to be appreciated. This is not installation art, or video art, or a performance. It is, instead, an environment. It requires viewer participation, but without the overt self-consciousness that often floods ‘relational aesthetic’ happenings.
The work is both digital and audio, on a very large-scale over a screen that stands in the center of the hall and a portion of the floor. Viewers can either stand on the side or enter onto (into?) the work, where black and white lines morph and evolve, pulsating to an all-encompassing electric audio heartbeat. The video portion is informed by Ikeda’s manipulation of a vast amount of information, digitized and arranged in a mad configuration.
The effect of The Transfinite is eerily zen in the monochromatic abstractions that unfold. The atmosphere it creates relays the sense of walking through a rock garden, a regression back into the womb, and receiving commands from some future dystopian overlord, all at the same time.
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More information on the project can be found on the Park Avenue Armory‘s website.
Kentaro Kobuke
May 9th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Kentaro Kobuke was born in 1975 in Hiroshima, Japan. The artist works with colored pencil, usually on boards of cherry wood, but also on collaged pieces of paper, such as envelopes. Kobuke works in a faux naive fashion, in similar fashion to Dubuffet, James Ensor, Dusty Boynton and John Lurie.
These paintings/drawings are colorful ruminations on nature and urban anxiety, traditional Japanese motifs revolving around animism, erotica, innocence and design. In a sense, they are ugly in their primitivism, but interesting in their strangeness, and I think that the look of the colored pencil on wood doesn’t translate well in jpeg form…they should be seen in person, if just to be able to appreciate their true size. I find myself drawn to their humor and quilt-patch quality. They are off-putting, but make me happy at the same time.
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All artwork copyright Kentaro Kobuke, who is represented by Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London. All images were borrowed from the gallery’s website.
Bye Bye Kitty
March 19th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
In a sad twist of irony, the first thing one sees upon entering the new exhibition at Japan Society is a huge pile of dead Japanese businessmen. Opening only a few days after the devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear scare trifecta that has struck Japan, the exhibition’s theme (young artists who are moving beyond the country’s Cute popular culture motifs and Superflat style) is timely, as Japan itself is drastically awakening into a new, somber era.
The pile of victims by Makoto Aida is but the first of many strong artworks in the show, which is a collection of some of the best young talent currently coming out of Japan. Bye Bye Kitty vigorously makes the case for a new direction in Japanese contemporary art. The exhibition does not seem to run thematically as much as it focuses on balance. There are artists who embrace parts of Japanese art history, and some who don’t focus directly on their nationality at all. Ink on paper, sculpture, painting, video, installation, all formats are addressed and spaced in a complimentary manner throughout.
In terms of pure skill, the most mind-blowing works are those by Manabu Ikeda (the third detail image posted above). All three of his works are very large in scale but minuscule in detail, as huge compositions, such as a Tree of Life, are full of small vignettes that seamlessly meld into one another. In these drawings, there is no space without a mark except for the small white figures that inhabit these worlds. The figures are just outlines, and are purely negative space (the only places where no marks exist). After investigating one of these drawings for several minutes you can appreciate why it takes him a year or two to complete one of them.
Yamaguchi Akira’s drawings adopt elements of traditional Japanese styles, but insert modern technology and life, as well as surreal figures and abstract violence, into the narratives. The second image above is a detail of one these works. I have posted mostly detail shots here because most of the works in this show are not just large, but require real investigation, either into the imagery or the materials of their construction. One misses a great deal by standing back to gain the full picture.
Rinko Kawaguchi’s photographs are another example of this. Installed as a large group, each work is both individual and part of a larger whole. Without individual titles, each quiet work is small and specific, but anonymous. Her series here seems to be dealing with the balance of birth and death.
Another standout artist is Hiraki Sawa, whose video work could almost be an homage to Joseph Cornell. Miwa Yanagi’s photographs and text works of her grandmother’s generation, Tomoko Kashiki’s gorgeous paintings, and Kumi Machida’s mechanical / traditional Nihonga-inspired works were all quite impactful as well. I particularly liked one line from the text portion of a Yanagi work: “One must decide one’s own age on a daily basis.” For these artists, and the country as a whole, it is certainly a new age.
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Bye Bye Kitty is open at the Japan Society through June 12th. Photos by Isabel Roxas.
Tomoaki Hata
March 17th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Men in dresses. With guns. Drag Queens in Japan are different from their New York counterparts
Tomoaki Hata’s photographs (at Miyako Yoshinaga Art Prospects) make this distinction clear, in scenes that are strangely both exotic and familiar. There is a toughness to the subjects he followed while making this series (mostly in the 1990′s and the first half of the 2000′s). There is a transparency here, instead of a faux feminine mystique there is a testosterone-fulled aggression in the faces of these ladies in the night. Out of drag the boys can seem quite lad-ish, rough around the edges. At other times they are seen as couples, half-naked embraces in the privacy of a bedroom. Sometimes times they are dressed for show: a man in a dress and a boa with full beard and no illusions.
The balance of isolation, camaraderie and exploration, all with hints of violence waiting just beyond the camera’s range, make this a surprisingly multi-layered exhibition. The subjects are quirky in a way that doesn’t seem to exist in New York, and Hata glides through the groups, both an observer and part of the crowd.
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Tomaoki Hata: The Night is Still Young is up at Miyako Yoshinaga through April 9th. A catalog has been produced. All artwork is copyright Tomoaki Hata
Nobuhiro Fukui
January 29th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Nobuhiro Fukui is a mostly self-taught photographer, and his images are the recordings of a nocturnal flaneur. The photographs are thoughtfully made but unplanned, they are captured during solitary walks or bike rides that the artist makes. Fukui has explained that there is not a subjectivity to these works, there is nothing that he is trying to show you or make a point of. They are instead about looking and watching, seeing what you see and what you do not.
There is an eery air to these photographs. The dreamlike lighting, the quiet. They are almost void of people. Much of this has to do with the time they were taken, between 12 and 3 AM, but Fukui is not trying to shoot “empty” or abandoned places. These scenes are full of life. Sometimes one sees a light in a window, or the trace of something left on the street. These buildings are places are used, and they look used, but they are captured in a moment of rest, when they can soak up the moist night air and forget about they day.
The pictures are pleasantly non-voyeuristic, as that is a bit worn out and would only look trite here. In his exhibitions these are mounted to plexi and placed unframed on the wall. Often Fukui arranges them in complimentary groups, sometimes a long row of photos mounted flush on a wall, not to create a narrative but just to keep the line that is naturally found within them going.
All of the photos posted above are from Nobuhiro Fukui’s website, and were all taken on a Sunday. A number of other works and installation photos, as well as some thoughtful interviews, can be found on the Tomio Koyama Gallery website.
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All artwork copyright Nobuhiro Fukui
Shintaro Kago
November 30th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Shintaro Kago is an illustrator and writer who specializes in modern Ero Guro themes. This form, which has a long history in Japan, is both visual and literary, and highlights what could be called twisted and macbre visions of the everyday world. These can be grotesque, psychosexual, gross, or just dark vignettes. The format, which perhaps was started in the 19th century in Japan, rose to prominence in the 1920′s and 30′s, booming once again with the advent of the manga culture.
Kago’s work is both clean and disturbing, and therein lies the appeal. Some of the images are quite subtle, you really need to zoom in to find the horror. His perspectives are warped, and his colors vibrant. His black and white work sometimes has the look of Dave Sim’s Cerebus.
Shintaro Kago also has started a YouTube channel, and posted a small selection of animations he has made (I assume recently). These are short and violent, but funny, in a Terry Gilliam way. The artist has created a number of manga books, and in 2008 illustrated the cover of Vice Magazine here in the U.S.
His website (in Japanese) can be found here.
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All artwork is copyright Shintaro Kago. The images were borrowed from a number of sites on the web.
Akira Shimidu
September 8th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Akira Shimidu, from Japan, is part of what is being considered the “Post Superflat” (post Murakami) generation. This group is also considered “post 9/11″, mostly due to the two exhibitions on this theme curated by Shimidu’s Japanese dealer, Hiromi Yoshii, at the old Deitch space in New York.
The notion of those themes, in my mind, dealt with the groups moving beyond simple pop iconography, and moving past pure Japonism. These new, younger artists are working with multi-media constructions, where detritus assemblage can be combined with musical creation, video, installation, and even fashion.
I think Shimidu exemplifies this aesthetic approach better than many. The work, sometimes as sculpture, sometimes as painting, often a hybrid of the two, could come from anywhere. It deals with cultural garbage and stimulation, not necessarily Japanese stimulation.
In this sense, Shimidu and his contemporaries are pushing new ground. They are moving beyond the comfort zone of their own sense of self, while retaining a playful air.
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Most of these images came from Hiromi Yoshii Gallery’s website.
Aiko Miyanaga
August 26th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Aiko Miyanaga’s work is unusual in that it is designed to disappear. The objects in her sculptural installations are made from naphthalene, the same chemical product used to make mothballs. Miyanaga uses the material to create personal possessions (shoes, clocks, combs) that sit inside specially built cases. Over the duration of an exhibition the naphthalene material slowly disintegrates, lining the inside of the sealed cases with a haze of crystals. By the end, the object is gone, leaving only the crystals and a small, even more personal token that she sometimes hides within the original sculpture.
The process is transcendental, more clean and spiritual than other forms that incorporate destruction, such as earth art. Her goal, as hinted in her artist’s statement, is to use the fact of the sculpture’s fading reality to make the works last in the viewer’s mind, and only in this sense will the work last forever.
Recently she has moved towards the gallery scene and started to create work that leaves at least something behind. The last image is one such example, where the sculpture is encased in resin. While the naphthalene structure still is allowed to evaporate, its cavity in the resin remains as artifact, like the dogs and people in the ash in Pompei.
Miyanaga is one of those artists who has found a way to create art that can escape the confines of ownership, that must be accepted as something to be only viewed, like the best things in nature, without the tacky and maudlin dependency on theory and artspeak to validate it. The work is simply beautiful, personal, and magical.
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All works are copyright Aiko Miyanaga. The images were borrowed from her website (seen here) and from Mizuma Art Gallery photos I found on the RealTokyo blog.
