Friday, December 31, 2010

Happy New Year! Top Tokyo Exhibitions of 2010

To celebrate the glorious end of Tokyo's 2010 exhibition year I put together the list of three of my favorite shows of the year. For the sake of even distribution I picked one show by an emerging gallery, one show by an established gallery and one museum show. 

Venue: TANA Bookshelf Gallery

Exhibition: SHIBUHAUSE installation

SHIBUHAUSE exhibition/performance installation view 

 Why: TANA was my most exciting discovery of the year. This new gallery unhinged itself from the constrictions brought on by commercial pressures without compromising its creative ambitions. Great new addition to the Tokyo art world.


Venue: Rat Hole Gallery

Exhibition: Miwa Yanagi "Lullaby"

“Lullaby,” 2009, 12 minutes, edition of 5, image courtesy of the gallery

Why: This show cleverly combined the works from an older photographic Fairy Tales series (2004–2006) with the her new video work Lullaby (2009) using the images in the photographs as a poetic key to unlock the symbolic cache of the video. I reviewed this show in the May 2010 issue of Artforum.

 

 

Venue: Mori Art Museum

Exhibition: Roppongi Crossing: Can there be Art?

KAMI & friends scateboarding performance, photo Joji Shimamoto

Why: This super-sized exhibition, for all the faults other reviewers noticed, definitely succeeded in showing the multifarious character of contemporary Japanese art. 

 

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Peter Yeoh vs. Julia Friedman

Peter Yeoh, the editor of London-based Glass magazine chose a black Rei Kawakubo (Comme des Garçons) pant skirt for a Taka Ishii gallery (Tokyo) event. The Contemporary Art Tokyo blogger, Julia Friedman, wore the Russian version by the designer Liudmila Mezentseva.

Who Wore It Best? Click here to cast your vote!

 

Leo Rubinfein at Taka Ishii

Taka Ishii and Leo Runinfien

The last opening of 2010 was for Leo Rubinfien's show at the Taka Ishii gallery. Rubinfien, who was raised in Tokyo but now lives in New York, came to prominence in the 1980s as a proponent of color photography. The photographs (ink jet prints) on view in the current show were taken over the period of some twenty years in locations all over the world. Taka Ishii is now closed for the holidays and will reopen January 6th, the show will be on through January 29th. 

 

 

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

TANA Gallery Bookshelf

One of Tokyo's newest and hippest gallery spaces TANA Gallery Bookshelf finished up their first year in style with an artist talk by Ryuta Ushiro of ChimPom and a one-day show of SHIBUYA=SHIBUHOUSE, a collective of young artists (the core of the group are students at the likes of Geidai and Musashino Art University), and frequently rotating "non-artists." Because of the direct correlation between the amount of gallery space and risk aversion TANA—a gallery in a bookshelf, literally—can afford to show risky works and artists and to remain outside of Tokyo's commercial artrace.

SIBUHOUSE exhibition installation view

Julia Friedman with TANA'S founder Tamura Masamichi

TANA displays and archives the most cutting edge works produced in the city, filling the niche between commercial galleries that choose their art, for the most part, on the promise of sales and international recognition, and the weekly-rental underworld in which many young artists are forced to operate. Its criteria for choosing exhibitions is the quality of the projects themselves, with no consideration given to financial consequences of the shows. Yet, TANA is not a fringe pro bono gallery. The tongue-in-cheek statement under the heading "Non Non-commercial" posted on the gallery's website tags it as : "an independent gallery indifferent to commercialism," that welcomes "commerce ... without commercialism." This model of operation where art supersedes money is refreshing but not at all utopian—TANA more than deserves to be on Tokyo's main gallery-hopping route.

 

 

 

I will do a separate posting shortly on the SHIBUHOUSE activities; this was my first encounter with the group and I look forward to learning (and reporting) and their gonzo activities. 

Saturday, December 25, 2010

Basquait: The Radiant Child

Sent from my iPhone

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Interfaces (Image, Texte, Language): Artists' Words & Writers' Images

Photo courtesy of Pat Greer

The new volume of the interdisciplinary journal Interfaces published collaboratively by the College of the Holy Cross and Université Paris Diderot is finally out! You can see the table of contents here. Among the papers is my essay "Alexei Remizov's Creative Act." Please click here for stunning two color reproductions from Remizov's 1937 illustrated album Récits de la quatrième dimention (sic).

Save the Date(s): Aki Sasamoto "Strange Attractors" Performances

Aki Sasamoto's first solo show in Japan is a homecoming of sorts. Sasamoto, who was born in Yokohama, received her MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University, and had make New York her home since. The current show at Take Ninagawa gallery is based on the project commissioned to the artist for the 2010 Whitney Biennial, but now it addresses a new set of contextual variables—geographical and cultural. The exhibition has been inaugurated with the initial performance on December 18, more performances are coming on December 26, 29 and January 9, 16, 29. All start at 16:00. Attendance is free but it is a good idea to contact the gallery as spaces are limited.  

Isabel Nolan at Gallery Side 2

Installation view with A Small Place Among Visible Things, 2010, polyethylene, jesmonite, paint, MDF, 23.5 x 31 x 25 cm

Isabel Nolan's Tokyo debut presents a selection of her recent watercolors, drawings and small-scale sculptures. The  works show Nolan's versatility with different media: shapes that appear in the watercolors migrate into sculptures and relief installations. Yet, Nolan's distinguishing trait is her romantic notion of personal expression that supersedes any formal amalgamation of modernist styles one can spot in her work. Even her six meter sculpture commissioned for the Dublin Airport retains the delicacy of touch that characterizes the smaller objects on view at Gallery Side 2. The show will be open through January 14th.

For more information on the artist and her work please visit her website.

"Sex Booze Weed Speed" at Rat Hole

The new Rat Hole Gallery exhibition is a two person show with a catchy title "Sex Booze Weed Speed." The two artists, American, Paris-based Oscar Tuazon and Norwegian Gardar Eide Einarsson put together a selection of works loosely based on Minimalist and Pop Art idioms. The installation is site-specific. Tuazon and Einarsson began to collaborate following the Whitney Museum of Art's Independent Study Program which they participated in 2001-2002. Rat Hole is preparing an eponymous publication, due out in January 2011. 

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Myths and Habits in The Improvised City

Last Thursday Julian Worrall's Llabo hosted a lecture byyoung Dutch designers Krijn Christiaansen and Kathelijne Montens. The two presented a variety of practical and whimsical projects intended to accommodate public spaces in Tokyo and surrounding areas. Unlike the overly sleek areas such as the Tokyo Midtown or Shiodome, Christiaansen and Montens's urban landscape projections are palimpsests that incorporate the history and practical usage of public spaces. Their purpose is not to organize (and subjugate) the environment in(to) artificial constructions that conceal practicality, but to adapt spaces for real public usage.  Not surprisingly, the drawings in the presentation looked more like clever child fantasies than organized and sterilized adult designs. They reminded me of Ilya Kabakov's total installation The Boat of My Life, where he ingeniously presented his life in a shape of a giant boat subdivided into compartments, each storing bits of his protean past.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Tomoko Sawada "Mirrors"

  Tomoko Sawada
Mirrors 1
2009
Digital c-print
4-3/8 x 7-1/16 inches

 

Tomoko Sawada
Mirrors 2
2009
Digital c-print
4-3/8 x 7-1/16 inches

Tomoko Sawada
Mirrors 16
2009
Digital c-print
4-3/8 x 7-1/16 inches

Tomoko Sawada
Mirrors 19
2009
Digital c-print
4-3/8 x 7-1/16 inches

Tomoko Sawada
Mirrors 27
2009
Digital c-print
4-3/8 x 7-1/16 inches

All Images Courtesy of the Gallery.

MEM gallery (now located in the NADiff complex) just closed a very interesting exhibition of Tomoko Sawada's photographic works. Sawada, who is originally from Kobe but is now based in New York, continues her inquiry into the formative elements of one's identity in a sequel to the 2008 series "Decoration" in which she examined the influence of street fashions on teenage identity. The latest show combines photographic imagery of a person shown "as is" with the mirror image of same person. The irregularities between the two are so subtle that the photographs initially appear to be double portraits of twins. The deceptively simple concept of the show is seconded in the minimalist appearance of the images. 

Tomoko Sawada "Mirrors"

Tomoko Sawada
Mirrors 1
2009
Digital c-print
4-3/8 x 7-1/16 inches

Tomoko Sawada
Mirrors 2
2009
Digital c-print
4-3/8 x 7-1/16 inches
Tomoko Sawada
Mirrors 5
2009
Digital c-print
4-3/8 x 7-1/16 inches Tomoko Sawada
Mirrors 16
2009
Digital c-print
4-3/8 x 7-1/16 inches

All Images Courtesy of the Gallery.

MEM gallery (now located in the NADiff complex) just closed a very interesting exhibition of Tomoko Sawada's photographic works. Sawada, who is originally from Kobe but is now based in New York, continues her inquiry into the formative elements of one's identity in a sequel to the 2008 series "Decoration" in which she examined the influence of street fashions on teenage identity. The latest show combines photographic imagery of a person shown "as is" with the mirror image of same person. The irregularities between the two are so subtle that the photographs initially appear to be double portraits of twins. The deceptively simple concept of the show is seconded in the minimalist appearance of the images.