architecture: new pantheon?

Teshima Art Musuem is located on an island in Seto Inland Sea. It faces the ocean from a hillside covered with rice terraces. The museum is unlike most art museums– unlike most buildings– in that it doesn’t treat the outside as a source of contamination and is completely open, a brandmark of Ryue Nishizawa from SANAA. Nishizawa, both working alone and with his partner Kazuyo Sejima, has gradually revolutionized museum architecture in Japan. The building itself resembles drop of water and corresponds with Rei Naito work Matrix which it hosts inside. A thin concrete slab stretches as long as sixty meters creating a large organic interior. Low ceiling, four-and-a-half meter height with two apertures let the light, rain and the air penetrate the inside. This structure was possible only thanks to technology since there is no straight line in the entire design. Inside water that had been welled from underground slowly springs up from various spots flow freely morphing into the shapes, whirl and disappear again. It's a place of meditation over life where architecture, art and environment blends together.

photos: Noboru Morikawa

exhibition: triennale

The fourth edition of Yokohama Triennale, titled OUR MAGIC HOUR - How Much of the World Can We know? focuses on art that makes use of motives related to mysteries of the world, everyday life and magical powers as we read in the guidebook introduction.

How much magic is in this exhibition?

At the Yokohama Museum of Art, which is for the first time the primary triennale venue, visitors are greeted by the rainbow sculpture entitled our magic hour, which also serves as the exhibition title and by the group of sculpture monsters guarding the entrance (both by Ugo Rondinone).




















photo: William Andrews

Inside, the first artwork beyond the museum lobby is Aurélien Froment video Théâtre de Poche in which magician conjures images into the air telling a cyclical tale. To either side of this gallery are minimal installations by James Lee Byars, Wilfredo Prieto and Motohiro Tomii. The two latter play with our notion of value arranging simple materials such as pins or zirconia so that they evoke viewers' astonishment. Following the route attentive viewer will spot easy-to-overlook work Still White, Corridor by Atsushi Saga, who polished the gallery wall to a subtle sheen.

Wilfredo Prieto, One, 2008

















photo: Monika Rendzner

James Lee Byars, The Diamond Floor, 1995




















photo: William Andrews

In other rooms contemporary art is integrated with works from museum's collection coming from different ages from ukiyo-e prints to Coptic textiles and mid-twentieth-century Surrealist paintings. The one which keeps me for longer is the Massimo Bartolini installation Organi, in which a scaffolding has been transformed into musical pipes with a small music box placed on the floor. Along with the Damien Hirst stain-glass shape multicoloured collages made of dried butterflies wings this high-ceiling room make me feel like in a chapel.

























photo: Monika Rendzner

The other venue is three-level BankART Studio NYK which has different dynamics and which hosts mostly site-specific installations. Here the artistic director, Akiko Miki, seems to walk away from the theme of wonderment prevailing in the main venue. This exhibition is partly playful with Rivane Neuenschwander interactive installations that resembling the playground on the second floor and partly meditative. I am glued to Susan Norrie video Transit in which she juxtaposes the owe of nature and the technological development that is used to control it. Christian Marclay video The Clock which won Golden Lion in Venice this year is one of the last work in the exhibition and one where most flock.

Rivane Neuenschwander, Prosopopaea, 2010/Izumi Taro, Fishbone as slang, 2010





















photo: Monika Rendzner

Whether the decision to include a greater number of local artists was intentional or resulted from shrunken budget it was good to see works by Yagi Lyota, Taro Izumi, Imamura Ryosuke, Yokoo Tadanori, Takahiro Iwasaki, Noguchi Rika and the Koichi Yumoto Collection of Japanese ghosts and monsters amongst others.

exhibition: incomplete

I'm now reading the catalogue of Tadanorii Yokoo show Incomplete - What's yours is mine. What's mine is mine, which was held in 2009 at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary art in Kanazawa. Tadanorri, a true pioneer in the realm of postwar Japanese visual and pop culture, at the age of 29 was catapulted into the upper echelons of the booming Japanese avant-gard art warld of mid 60s. thanks to his most remarkable graphic art posters.






















His bright colour palette and pastiche-like images culled from pop culture proved incredibly popular and soon Yokoo became a much sought after designer, being commissioned to create not only posters for the theatre and art world but also ad campaignes. He also began to paint. His works from that time present bold images of women (pink girls) who brazenly expose themselves as they never would normally.




















After producing 20 of these paintings over May-June of 1966, which gain him a label of art world bad boy, Yokoo distanced himself from painting until early 80s. when he decided to move away from graphic art and become full time painter. Yokooo's painting style varies greatly, from almost photorealistic depictions to highly impressionistic. I don't have any particulare style, he syas. The look of the painting changes to suit the subject matter or theme. Though, as with his graphics design works, Yokoo's paintings have their own set of recurring motifes. One of them is a series of Y-junction paintings that depict a deserted intersection in an anonymous Japanese town, with a narrow, dilapidated building, a bar or restaurant of some sort, wedged between the two forks in the road. The time of day, weather conditions, and identifying markers like shop and street signs vary with each painting, but the cumulative effect is one of devastating bleakness and isolation. The Y intersaction paintings are reminiscent of the works of Giorgio de Chirico (Italian Surrealist) best known for his depiction of large, empty plazas with looming buidings and monuments.

Yokoo is one of the star artist at this year's Yokohama Triennale, for which he painted 15 works representing a new development in the Y-junction series. This deeply coded and personal series can be perceived as a crossroad of now at which one is force to choose one of two options.
Interview with Yokoo Tadanori.

project room: Yukihiro Taguchi

Yukihiro Taguchi Moment: Performative Hills is the commisioned work for the MAM Project, where white wood panels are stripped off the gallery walls and make their way out of Mori Museum. Away from the gallery walls they become involved in a number of performative installations, their activity is recorded as a stop-motion animation and then exhibited back within museum walls. Edan Corkil, staff writer of Japan Times, interviewing the artist wonders why Taguchi is not behind the bars yet for what seems in Japan "an obstruction of public thoroughfare".

Taguchi has an answer for this, he lives and works in Berlin. If I had stayed in Tokyo I would have ended up a very different artist he says. Things are done differently over there. There's an openness, a willingness to try things, and it invites experimentation.

He graduated from most prestigious of art schools in Japan, Tokyo University of the Arts. But since he was keen to avoid a trap of rental gallery system, where one spend a year doing part time jobs only to make enough money for a single show which lasts only for a week, he went to Berlin which changed his art thoroughly. Although he spent four years in oil-painting department he is influenced by Tadashi Kawamata who works in the midst of demolition and construction building new and unusual structures from scrap or reclaimed materials. You can read more of artist's confessions at: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fa20110630a1.html

interview: a girl who almost swallowed a tapeworm

I recently visited the world only Parasite Museum to find soon afterwards Kuronuma Mayumi, the artist who got inspired by the tapeworms displayed in the ultra-marine-colored background show cases.

Here's an excerpt of an interview with the artist published in WHO series.

Roger McDonald: The first artwork that caught my attention was the tapeworms. I heard that she would go to the parasite museum to sketch, but what was interesting was that, she would not only draw from the skatches but also creat life-size knitted tapeworm. I asked Kuronuma san to exhibit her knitted tapeworms in the several projects [..] At Fukui Art Musuem it was displayed on the floor as one long line. Just like an actual tapeworm, the work keeps changing its form.

RM: Have you ever tried to put one inside you?
Kuronuma Mayumi: It's said that they are probably now extinct so you cannot get larva anymore [..].

RM: Mayumi are there any artists that you particularly like?
KM: I like Kelly and Henry Darger.

RM: Kelly really makes interesting things. He is an artist fascinated by subculture, punkhorror and the occult. When we talk about Mike Kelly, the word 'abject' is often used.
I don't think you are an ousider like Darger, but you have this kind of haunting or obsessive quality [..].

video: Hiraki Sawa

Hiraki Sawa, Figment, video, 2011
"A boy closes his eyes for 25 minutes and wakes up with the world gone from behind his thoughts. His language slips and shifts, he tastes orange juice without knowing anymore to describe it as sour, he likes numbers but cannot put names to faces. His room is filled with a thousand records and many more. He sees the records, unable to listen. He can't see the floor, has never seen the floor beneath them, wouldn't recognise it if he met it in the street. He meets people in the street and his only option is to trust that they know him when they say they do. His records become opaque, circular slabs of the unknown and the unknowing. A fog of landscapes without contours, without borders, that can only be read by touching. To move forward he must step out, one foot then the other, and believe that he is indeed moving. His mind like an emptied lake, the sky welling upward and outward, unable to contain the depth of it all, the bottomless, fathomless wealth of the things he lost in his sleep"*.

A new work in which Sawa explores the phenomenon of amnesia and the devastation of severe memory loss through a series of abstract visual sequences.

*Text by Dale Berning

neo-Nihonga

On the ocassion of the Singapore Biennale Japan Creative Center presents Akira Yamaguchi new project Singa Planet along with few previous pieces. In the catalogue forward we read: The characteristic feature of Yamaguchi Akira's work is his way of incorporating various manners and events from different ages and cultures, as well as scenes of contemporary life into the formats of rakuchu rakugai zu (panoramic scenes of urban life during the Edo period). This time however Singa planet was inspired by the contemporary life of Singapore and its publicly governed and developed housing facilities populated by over 85% of society.








Department store: New Nihonbashi Mitsukoshi, 2004
From the previous works that attracted me a lot is the one above partly because it shows my neighborhood, party because it brings new dimention to the discussion about Meji-era Nihonbashi Bridge and the Metropolitan Expressway arching above it. The later was built in 60s. when Tokyo underwent major makeover before Tokyo Olimpics and is considered a symbol of landscape distruction since it was built over the old bridge. When the city competed for 2000 Olimpics there had been some plans to hide the expressway underground. But there are also voices that the present landscape is far more precious and Tokyoesque than Nihonbashi bridge which is after all just a mere copy of something one would find in Europe.
In his painting Yamaguchi adds another bridge to the landscape which is the orginal wooden bridge from Edo-era built over the expressway and a cinical comment to the whole discussion.

Yamaguchi witty painting style with sense of play and enterteinment makes his picture accounts for his popularity among the viewers and the rising prices for his works which I experianced personally buying recently one of his prints.