"Salaryman/Superman" at Tana the Bookshelf Gallery

LG Williams, Salaryman/Superman, 2011, installation view

Tana's director Tamura Masamichi

Baron Osuna (Super Window Project) with the artist

Baron Osuna and Tamura Masamichi

Still independent curator Shai Ohayon and Beatriz Inglessis

The SHIBUHOUSE gang Tana's latest show was a cheeky production by a visiting American artist LG Williams who utilized every centimeter of the gallery space. The crowd gathered for the inauguration party could witness the shelf brimming with salaryman's clothes shed as he took off to save the world.  

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.