exhibition: out of doubt

               
For this four iteration of the Mori Art Museum's comprehensive triennial of contemporary Japanese art, the institution's chief curator Mami Kataoka, is joined by guest curator from Australia and US. Together, they have selected a group of thirty participants, which (unlike in years past) also includes expatriate Japanese artist and those of Japanese decent: Ei Arakawa, Aki Sasamoto, and Simon Fujiwara to name a few. The roster is farther expanded with work by several postwar artists such as anti-art pioneer Genpei Akasegawa, reportage painter Hiroshi Nakamura, and Mono-ha artist Kishio Suga.

Kishio Suga, Linked Space,  2010, wire, cement
Installation view: Gallery 604, Busan; photo: Sato Tsuyoshi

Among other figures, who utilized nonsensical painting, incomplete objects, and performance to question cultural values and disrupt rigid social programs. Seen in dialogue, the art of this international ensemble promises to demonstrate the ways in which ideologic and methodological legacies of the Japanese avant-garde have been transmitted between generations.

Mika Tajima, The Extras, 2010, wood, canvas, acrylic paint, silkscreen, mirrored aluminum, wood, paper, plexiglas, MDF, spray enamel, video monitor, formica, glass, lights; photo: Jason Mandella, Courtesy: Sculpture Center, New York

(Artforum Sep 2013 issue)

exhibition: curated body

Eikoh Hosoe, Man and Woman #24, 1960

Eikoh Hosoe emerged in the experimental arts movement of post-war Japan. Early on in his career he abandoned the documentary style prevalent in the post-war years and produced work that breathed a sense of experimentation and freedom into photography. He developed a unique style combining photography with elements of theatre, dance, film and traditional Japanese art.

Eikoh Hosoe, Man and Woman #20, 1960

Hosoe gained recognition in the late 1950s with the series Man and Woman (1959) wielding power in their explicit exploration of the human form. Permeated by dark, obscure images of naked bodies, Man and Woman is inspired by Tatsumi Hijikata, the charismatic dancer and founder of Butoh dance movement, whom he met through his friend, the writer Yukio Mishima. Hosoe’s concerns resonated deeply with Hijikata whose performance explores themes of death and eroticism through exaggerated, and extremely slow movement, by performers covered in white body paint.

Eikoh Hosoe, Embrace #60, 1970

Produced then years later Embrace series reduce the model’s flesh to a calm abstract contemplation of body contours.  Human limbs are treated as the subjects of a still life, but there is a surprising amount of movement as well —muscles are taught, and bodies are folded and pressed against one another.

In 1974, Hosoe was selected by MoMA as one of 15 artists in the first major survey of Japanese photography outside of Japan. Images from his Man and Woman series were part of the landmark exhibition, New Japanese Photography, and are now on view once again in Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery in New York, along with the prints from Embrace series. 

project room: Three

               

Three (est. 2009), an anonymous artist collective from Fukushima Prefecture stayed in New York for the month of July as the first invitees to Japan Society's Summer Artist Residency Program. 

Hailing from Fukushima, the artists were direct victims of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear fallout. In fact, their latest work “Tokyo Electric” was created for the 2nd anniversary of the earthquake. The imposing cubic structure stands over 3 meters high and is built to the same scale of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, explains the artists. It was made from 151,503 soy sauce containers – a number that happens to represent the number of displaced citizens.

Multiplicity is a common element in Three’s work. And their medium of choice – often objects that are cheaply mass-produced – is a reminder of our increasingly inorganic society and the death of the individual. Numerology is equally important element and so during the month-long stay Three created 555 works using 500 Japanese comic and anime plastic figures and 55 of their American counterparts taking cue from the number five in homage to five boroughs of New York.

do it!

collection of painted days

On Kawara studio

On Kawara is interested in time - its days, years, centuries, and eons. Each Date painting of his Today Series, the magnum opus that he begun in 1966, is a monochrome field on which is written the date of the day on which the painting was executed, in the language and according to the calendar of the country Kawara was in at the time. If he does not complete a painting by midnight, he destroys it. Some days he makes two paintings, very occasionally, he makes three, but most days he makes none.

Every painting in the series conforms to one of eight sizes, all horizontal in orientation, ranging from eight by ten inches to sixty-one by eighty-nine inches. And for every painting the artist mixes the color afresh, so that the chroma of each is unique. Tonalities in the brown-gray and blue-black range have dominated in recent years. four of five coats of acrylic are evenly applied to the canvas, creating a dense matte surface, onto which letters, numbers, and punctuation marks are then built up by hand, rather than aid of stencils. Initially he used an elongated Gill Sans typeface, later a quintessentially modernist Futura.

Each painting is stored in a handmade cardboard box with a clipping from a newspaper published in the same city and on the same day that the painting was made. (Kawara has exhibited the works both with and without the boxes.) A constant traveler, Kawara has created date paintings in over 112 cities worldwide, in the project that will end only with his death.

art in action: sincere cappuccino

The works I like most is always the art I don't understand, those that stick in mind but eludes in every other way. This is very true of Aki Sasamoto, whose studio I visited recently.

Japanese artist who has been living in New York for over 8 years, gained attention for her multimedium installation/performances at the 2010 Whitney Biennial. More recently, her first solo exhibition in New York featured humble dollar-store materials in an expansive, ephemeral installation of sound and sculpture titled Talking in Circles in Talking. The gallery walls were transformed into a climbing-wall-cum-whiteboard, creating a backdrop for several performances.

Sasamoto placed eight stainless-steel mixing bowls on the floor around the narrow gallery. An ice pick stood upright inside each bowl, and on its sharp tip balanced a smaller steel bowl, face down. Above these precarious contraptions hung large chunks of ice suspended in loosely woven baskets made of brightly colored shoelaces. As the ice melted, the pinging of the drips on the metal was amplified through small microphones, filling the gallery with percussive, Tin Pan Alley-like sounds. Frozen inside the ice were small items, including keys, eyeglasses and wristwatches, symbolizing the "owned" nature of objects. According to Sasamoto, at the time of death, people become the objects that they are physically close to, in the way ice becomes water—a theory she articulated during her performances. continue reading

Sasamoto performances are surreal, self-contained worlds of free associations that marry distorted everyday objects with lectures and monologues, which are both melancholy and amusing. Perhaps neither the artist nor the viewer can fully comprehend what is taking place, but Sasamoto has found her own way of deferring that understanding. As she says everything we don't comprehend goes inside a pickling pot with the hope that it tastes better in the future. 

exhibition: Il Palazzo Enciclopedico

Earlier this month I visited Massimiliano Gioni's much anticipated The Encyclopedic Palace in Venice. To my and many others delight Gioni's elegant show blurred the distinction between outsider and professional artists presenting tantalizing roster of unknowns. Among them Shinichi Sawada born with severe autism who express himself through sculpting an expanding menagerie of clay figures in his mountaintop studio.  

All of Sawada's works - dragons, demons, totemic figures with multiple faces, and twisted, howling masks - bristle with hundreds of handmade clay spikes, which give them an intricate, ornamental beauty and a menacing look. Some seem to be inspired by ancient Japanese lore, other by Noh theatre masks or even Manga and Anime. Yet others recall the arts of African tribes but their true nature and cosmology state the inner life of the artist and may never be known.

The other Japanese artist in the show is not so unknown and since his works have been sown at last dOCUMENTA (13). Nevertheless it was good to see his riotous, multi-layered works in painting, sculpture and bookmaking in different context, which played in his favor. Responding directly to mass media and contemporary urban life, Shinro Ohtake's works feature accumulations of found materials, which manage to suggest both short burst of slapdash energy and years of considered, geologically paced buildup.

One of the most prominent and persistent facets of Ohtake's practice is his series Scrapbooks, which, since its inception in 1977, has grown into a collection of over 60 individual books, some over seven hundred pages long. These books hold mountainous collections of found materials, which the artis collages and paints to create complex compositions on each page of the book so that each of them become sculptural object.

text based on Il Palazzo Enciclopedico guidebook