Lee Ufan Exhibition Review

I am reposting an interesting review of the Lee Ufan show at SCAI THE BATHOUSE published by the Tokyo Weekender.

Clear Your Calendars: TOKYO FRONTLINE at 3331 Arts Chiyoda

TOKYO FRONTLINE is the new contemporary art and photography art fair, scheduled to open in the 3331 Arts Chiyoda on February 17th and run throughout the weekend. The new fair will consists of three sections.

1. THE FRONTLINE will be showcasing young artists both represented by galleries (Tomoko Atsuchi of TARO NASU, Ken Kagami of Taka Ishii, Yusuke Komuta of SCAI THE BATHHOUSE, Tomoko Nagai of Tomio Koyama) and independent (Teng-Yuan Chang, Soichiro Murata, Hiraku Suzuki, Soshiro Matsubara). This part is curated and will be accompanied by an iPad year book app.

2. THE EXCHANGE is a networking space meant to bring together galleries, publishers, art collectives, art foundations, etc. 

3. GYM is a sales section, the actual art fair portion of the event, where galleries that range from the young to the more established houses will present and sell their wares. Most participants are from Tokyo, with a sprinkling of galleries from Kyoto, Osaka. The international contingent is represented by Gallery Jinsun and Gallery Godo from Seoul and AFA Macao (Macao, China). 

For more information please go to the event website.

Clear Your Calendars: TOKYO FRONTLINE at 3331 Arts Chiyoda

[[posterous-content:pid___0]]TOKYO FRONTLINE is the new contemporary art and photography art fair, scheduled to open in the 3331 Arts Chiyoda on February 17th and run throughout the weekend. The new fair will consists of three sections.

1. THE FRONTLINE will be showcasing young artists both represented by galleries (Tomoko Atsuchi of TARO NASU, Ken Kagami of Taka Ishii, Yusuke Komuta of SCAI THE BATHHOUSE, Tomoko Nagai of Tomio Koyama) and independent (Teng-Yuan Chang, Soichiro Murata, Hiraku Suzuki, Soshiro Matsubara). This part is curated and will be accompanied by an iPad year book app.

2. THE EXCHANGE is a networking space meant to bring together galleries, publishers, art collectives, art foundations, etc. 

3. GYM is a sales section, the actual art fair portion of the event, where galleries that range from the young to the more established houses will present and sell their wares. Most participants are from Tokyo, with a sprinkling of galleries from Kyoto, Osaka. The international contingent is represented by Gallery Jinsun and Gallery Godo from Seoul and AFA Macao (Macao, China). 

For more information please go to the event website.

Kohei Nawa "SYNTHESIS"

Kohei Nawa is one of the young Japanese artists whose work is successfully promoted by Scai the Bathhouse gallery. The 2010 is forming to be something of an annus mirabilis for Nawa: he is participating in the Busan Biennale, as well as representing Japan at the 14th Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh. His current projects range from collaborations on mobile phone applications to public art installation in Odaiba. In addition, he is planning to open a new studio in Kyoto from where he will implement and supervise his various undertakings.

Last night's opening at the Scai was one of the best attended I have seen in a Tokyo gallery so far. Among the works on view were the centerpiece PixCell-Double Deer and its head-only version. The first gallery had a wrap-around drawing installation, more drawings were displayed in the larger gallery and upstairs.

The show will be on through the end of October.

William Eggleston at the Hara Museum

My review of William Eggleston's Paris-Kyoto show at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art has just been posted on the Artforum Critics' Picks.

If you would like to see more of Eggleston's work, SCAI THE BATHHOUSE gallery is now showing him as well. Their exhibition, William Eggleston: 21st Century will be on view through August 4.

Anish Kapoor at SCAI THE BATHHOUSE

Installation view with mirror piece (Untitled, 2010, stainless steel, 230x230x44 cm)

Anish Kapoor's third solo exhibition at SCAI THE BATHHOUSE gallery amply proves that his small scale works can be just as effective (if not stunning) as his well publicized large scale installations. The five works on view at the SCAI range from an 1979-80 wood and chalk powder installation to last year's concave illusion mirror made of numerous stainless steel parts. Just like the giant site-specific sculpture Memory, shown at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the mirror (Untitled, 2010) engages through more than just vision: as one approaches the object, the acoustic background continues to change relative to the distance and the angle between the sculpture and the viewer's ear. The effect—something akin to sensory disorientation—is enhanced by the multitude of fragmented reflections whose upward/downward direction changes depending on the distance from the work.

Untitled, 2007, fiberglass, 121.5 cm diameter

A different Untitled, a fiberglass ball is hung exactly 230" above the floor. Appreciating it requires a suspension of disbelief on the part of the viewer, so the ball could be sequentially read as rolling, hanging or falling. This sculpture, as well as another one, a granite andlacquer piece made in collaboration with a Japanese urushi lacquer wareartist, presents Kapoor's trademark vortex shape first tried out in the works from the mid 90s. Only now the vortex is not flush with the gallery wall, so the space behind the smooth lacqueredsurface is revealed as it would be in any sculpture-in-round forcing the viewer to follow the initial experience of being pulled towards the implied gap, with that of discovering spatially finite, graspable quality of the work. The artist's admission to the specificity of the object (as Donald Judd tagged it), offers an alternative to the subliminal quality of Kapoor's larger works: still phenomenological, the works in the SCAI show afford more than a mere fragmented reflection of his awe-inspiring large scale sculptures.