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. 

 

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. 

 

 

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 Chim↑Pom 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. 

Aki Sasamoto Performance at Take Ninagawa

See the full gallery on posterous

See the full gallery on posterous

Basquait: The Radiant Child

Sent from my iPhone

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).