Tonight: Hiromiyoshii Openings

Hiromiyoshii Gallery is opening two new shows, one in the main location (group show featuring Kim Inseon, Natasha Lo, Chen Wei, Chi Peng, Seokho Kang, Kun Ying Lin, Li Ren Chang, sangjunRoh and Weston Takeshi Teruya), another, entitled "ABSTRACT PORTRAIT" at their new gallery in Roppongi Pyramid Building. The Kyosumi-Shirakawa opening is 6–8, the one in Roppongi is 7–10. 

Clear Your Calendars: G-TOKYO 2011

Alfredo Jaar Solo Exhibition, Kenji Taki Gallery

The most anticipated Tokyo art fair of the year is just around the corner. G-TOKYO 2011, no in its second year, will again be held at the Mori Arts Center Gallery where leading commercial galleries in town will compete for attention. This year the event will incorporate the two-day art fair (February 19th and 20th), followed by exhibition week (February 21–27). This year's exhibitors are: ARATANIURANO, Gallery Koyanagi, Gallery Side 2, hiromiyoshii, KENJI TAKI GALLERY, Kodama Gallery, Tomio Koyama Gallery, Mizuma Art Gallery, Ota Fine Arts, Scai the Bathhouse, ShugoArts, Taka Ishii Gallery, TARONASU, WAKO WORKS OF ART and Yamanoto Gendai. 

For mor information please visit the event website. 

Openings: Kiyosumi and Shirokane Art Complexes

Another night of openings in the Kiyosumi and Shirokane art complexes. Tomio Koyama Gallery presented video works of the Daiwa Foundation Art Prize winner Marcus Coates. His video work Dawn Chorus (2007) is a set up of several screens that show people in their natural habitat lipsynching bird songs recorded in the woodlands of Northern England.

One floor below hiromiyoshii gallery inaugurated an exhibition of Takehito Koganezawa's planetary photography and sculptures, with a separate little room devoted to his earlier drawings and sketches.

The Kodama Gallery showed Kenji Nohara's painting, sculpture and 3D objects. My favorite was a souvenir mask he brought back from Mexico. The gimpish-looking silver mask, lined with pieces of mirror fragments, was suspended on the little clothing rack.

Nanzuka Underground had a selection of large and colorful canvas by the veteran artist Keiichi Tanaami. The story depicted in the paintings was inspired by traditional Chinese narratives and history.

On the opposite end of the visual scale were Etsuko Fukaya's minutely detailed prints at the Yamomoto Gendai gallery.

Most shows will be on through the first week of December. Please refer to galleries' sites for details.

Kiyosumi galleries—new exhibits

The night of October 10 was rather busy with new shows opening in five of the Kiyosumi-Shirakawa art complex galleries. Atsushi Suwa's hyper realist works on view at Kido Press Inc. challenge any preconceived media boundaries. Hiromiyoshii is hosting its first solo exhibits for two artists: the American T.J. Wilcox, showing his engrossing film narratives and multimedia montages; and the Okinawan born, New York based Futoshi Miyagi whose repositories of personal ephemera take shape of finely crafted paper mosaics set against the background of several small installations. Taka Ishii Gallery is presenting ten works (photographs and sculptures) by Yuki Kimura, tracing her preoccupation with visual memory and the notion of framing. Do not miss an interesting curatorial touch: an opaque life-size image of black Plexiglass opens the show making you second guess the meaning of other partially obscured found images from some seventy years ago. Next door, ShugoArts is holding its third exhibit of Leiko Ikemura's tempera on jute paintings in which formal transparency (the weave of the support shows through) echoes content shifts between the imaginary and the real. Yutaka Watanabe's work, including six new paintings where objects move in and out of focus are on view at the Tomio Koyama Gallery. One floor up, also at Tomio Koyama, award-winning Chinese artist Wei Jia is having his first Japanese show. Jia's introspective canvases tackle the mysteries of imagination with their intermingling of awe and fear. Dimmed lights of the galleries add to the effect, giving just the perfect amount of exposure to the works' acrylic impasto. All shows will be up through the end of the month, Ikemura is on view through November 21.