Tonight: Kodama Gallery in Kyoto Kohei Kajihara Opening

If you still have time to make it to Kyoto (or you are there already), here is a poster for the new show opening tonight at Kodama Gallery Kyoto.

Shirokane Art Complex Openings

The first shows of the New Year in the Shirokane art complex were a bit underwhelming. Kodama gallery held a group show "ignore your perspective 11" featuring the works of Sunao Horikawa, Masahiro Sekiguchi, Keisuke Sugimoto, Hidekazu Tanaka, Mayuko Wada and Shuhei Yagi. Some of the artists represented were moved up in the ranks from the second floor (young artist) space in the gallery's Kyoto space to the gallery's Tokyo space. 

Another group show, at Nanzuka Underground, combined the works of the Tokyo-based Hiroki Tsukuda and Tomoo Gokita and a young Belgian artist Rinus van de Velde. The exhibition was loosely based on the theme of graphic representation, showcasing the ability of the three artists to handle the subtleties of gray scale. 

Yamamoto Gendai, who is currently having one of their artists as the subject of a spectacularly produced solo show at the Mori museum, started the 2011 with a solo show of Tiger Tateishi's work. Online Radar presented three large canvases that have been held in a corporate collection from 1994 (the time of their production) until now. 

 

 

Shirokane Art Complex openings

Maoya Kishi

backronym 1, 2010

mixed media

50 x 50 x 127 cm

Last weekend the four galleries of the Shirokane art complex opened their next round of exhibitions. Kodama gallery presented, for the third time, Maoya Kishi's installations. The new show—backronym—contains a selection of Kishi's mixed media nonrepresentational sculptures with just a hint of kinetics in them.

Two floors above, at the Yamomoto Gendai gallery, Masakatsu Takagi had a two room video installation. The larger of the rooms contained three channel projection of a rather interesting and intensely visceral animation Ymene. Takagi's oneiric pyrotechnics contrast with Kishi's constructions in its emphasis on the random.

Taku Anekawa, mixed media, episode.7 moro

Somewhere in between these two shows is Nanzuka Underground's new exhibition of Taku Anekawa's embroidery books and large format collages. Just as Kishi, Anekawa pieces together the fragments (in his case, pieces of fabric and machine embroidery) to form his own ideosincratic narrative.

The fourth opening reception was held at the London Gallery, one floor above Yamomoto Gendai. Unlike its three neighbors who show only contemporary works, London Gallery features old Japanese art, although does so surroundings designed by none other than Hiroshi Sugimoto himself. The screen in the photo above is most certainly worth a visit to the Shirokane complex.

Kyoto: Kenji Nohara "Cloudy to Fine Play"

The Kodama Gallery in Kyoto just closed their latest show of Kenji Nohara.This is the artist’s third exhibition with Kodama, the previous one was held in Tokyo last November. There were several already familiar works (a plant-like sculpture whose trunk is “planted” in a large pot and whose with molecular-looking leaves have the underside of playing cards, a Mexican souvenir mask lined with fractured mirror fragments, and the groupings of ameba-shaped mirror puddles). A sliver of gallery space was partitioned off for a separate installation of an alley-coffee-house. According to the artist, this installation combines his ruminations on the cultural importance of back alleys, and his memory of a particular coffee house where an old man, visible only from the back, was playing the game of chess—the clicking of the pieces interrupting the silence. The alley-coffee-house is squeezed into a tight space that ends in a sharp-angle lined with mirrors. A heating lamp pointed at a plush cherry red velvet chair keeps the front of the shop realistically warm, while faint tapping stands or the sound of a virtual chess match.

The show also featured half a dozen new large-format paintings, some containing found objects, and an interesting grouping of small multi-media collages. Among these, one collage departs from the basic rectangular format because the thickness of its right margin is almost double of its left. The resulting effect is that of a book left ajar: something presently invisible is about to be revealed.

The theme of pending disclosure repeats in the left section of the collage where a boy scout voyeuristically peeks around an imaginary corner at a vintage pencil drawing of a wide-eyed girl. In my opinion, it is the act of looking that connects these new collages and themirror sculptures: a perfunctory first look, must be followed by a scrutinizing study of the subject, still even then seeing the whole work would possibly require a system of multiple mirrors or some other such magical device for unpacking the artist’s imagination.

Mamoru Sakagawa Retrospective

The Tokyo branch of the Kodama Gallery is now showing the last nine years of Mamoru Sakagawa's work. The objects range from the 2001 acrylics of muscle men, to drawings, to the latest experiments with india ink and fabric appliqué. The oldest works, interestingly enough, suggest a loosely visceral quality in the artist's approach: it is as if even when the actual anatomical visualization disappeared, the physicality transferred into the very process of looking.

Recent Openings: Kodama & Nanzuka Underground

Tatjana Doll photographed with

SPEED_Shinkansen Bullet Train 2011

enamel, acrylic,

2m x 30m (10 pieces), 2008

Image courtesy of Nanzuka Underground

The new exhibitions in Kodama Gallery and Nanzuka Underground Gallery (both in the Shirokane Art Complex) serendipitously, address speed and movement, but do so in different ways.

Kodama presents a collection of video/sonic work by a Kyoto-based artist Akira Miyanaga. The main gallery contains an installation in which the two larger walls combine projections from six smaller wall segments. The video appears to be shot from a left-side window of a moving car, and the projection on the large walls in oriented clockwise. This naturally aligned direction is contradicted by the counter-clockwise movement on the smaller walls, so that the overall effect is at once enveloping and disorienting. The viewer can sense the speed, but the reverse movement on the smaller walls suppresses the sensation of movement and the viewer is suspended in the midst of streetlights and neon that illuminate city night. The purposefully exposed projector cords continue the theme of road construction, part of the cityscape in the video.

Akira Miyanaga, "about the lights of land", 2010, 8 channel video projection, 5 minutes loop

One floor above, in the Nanzuka Underground Gallery, the German artist Tatjana Doll is making her Tokyo debut. This show consists of several enamel on canvas paintings and two videos. Doll's two-dimensional works convey the sensation of speed through the combination of large scale and angularity. The cars she paints seem to come alive—the doors of the Lamborgini stretching up and out like giant bat wings. The only painting in the show containing a human figure Rip Stealing Beauty (2009), reflects the movement and the angularity of the car representations that surround it. Doll's nod to Japan's contribution to the discourse of speed is the representation of Shinkansen bullet train shown in the gallery as a video.

ARTFORUM review of Tamotsu Ikeya

My review of Tamotsu Ikeya's show in the Kyoto branch of Kodama Gallery has been printed in the March issue of Artforum.

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.