exhibition: Taro Award

Taro Okamoto was an artist leading his era, always challenging towards something new. In 1954, Okamoto published a book called Today’s Art subtitled Who will Make History. 

The Okamoto Taro Memorial Award for Contemporary Art, commonly referred to as the Taro Award, was established shortly after he passed away. It is one of Japan's most coveted art recognitions and the only one these days that actively encourages radical experimentation. 

This year the Taro Okamoto Award went to Kyun-Chome an art unit composed of two artists, Honma Eri and Nabuchi who's portfolio parallels that of Chim↑Pom in a number of ways (performances pieces staged and recorded in restricted areas around Fukushima, interactive gallery installations which temper with Japanese paradigms and cultural taboos and the central focus on a female character), which is of no surprise considering that Kyun-Chome were previous apprentices of Chim↑Pom's. 

For the 17th Taro Okamoto Contemporary Art Award exhibition they spread one-ton of white rice on the floor with the mound of red painted rice in the center, which combined resembled Japanese flag. To enter the space the visitors had to go under the do-not-enter tape and walk on rice to view video work showing the New Years's Eve of 2013 in abandoned Fukushima. Whilst everywhere else in Japan people went to their local temples to ring the bells and chase away all the past year evils, Fukushima remained silent until someone broke-into prohibited zone to toll the bell there as well. 

exhibition: Kazuko Miyamoto

Miyamoto was primarily a painter of large-scale bichromatic multi-media canvases, works that inflected and, in some ways, undermined formal systems with modest, organic painterly elements that would satisfy the strictest dictates of orthodox minimalism.

In 1969, Kazuko Miyamoto was working in her live-in studio at 117 Hester Street when the fire alarm went off. Congregating on the street below with other artists from the building, she met her neighbor Sol Le Witt, and soon after become his assistant. For several decades, she executed his wall drawings and oversaw the production of his modular cube sculptures.

Today, the Japanese-American artist is best known for her signature post-Minimalist works. Her recent self-titled exhibition in Invisible Exports examined the beginnings of her work and featured a judicious selection from 1970s drawings as well as one of her signature installation pieces—a structure made simply of thread and nails that protrudes from the bare walls of the space.

Miyamoto (now the owner of Gallery Onetwentyeight, in Manhattan's Lower East Side) developed her signature nail and thread style of installation throughout the '70s. She continued building these site-specific sculptures throughout her career. And over time, she found herself gradually abandoning strict measurements. Her sculptures became increasingly organic. As Miyamoto once wrote of herself in a press release for her first solo exhibition in New York in 1973: "Kazuko create[s] linear system by extending string between nails on wall. These materials and lighting form an area of sensitivity and spaciousness. The most beautiful is to have nothing on the wall, the second most beautiful is to have line on it, and then the third is to break the wall."

art in action: Eiko&Koma

38 Works (1976 - 2011) from Eiko and Koma on Vimeo.

Since 1972, Japanese-born dancers, Eiko&Koma have created a unique and riveting theatre of movement out of stillness, light and sound. Primal, intense, and powerfully moving, their pieces explore elemental themes such as birth, death, desire, struggle ,and profound connection between human and nature. Eiko&Koma studied with Kazuo Ohno in Japan, Manja Chmiel in Germany and Lucas Hoving in the Netherlands before moving to United states in 1976. Yet they do not consider themselves as dancers in any traditional sense. rather, they think of themselves as artists whose medium is movement and whose work resides in the space between dance, theatre, performance art, and sculpture. This is why throughout their careers they have presented their works outside conventional dance venues. Exactly a year ago I saw their installation The Caravan Project performed in a specially modified trailer in the garden lobby of MoMA. Now I'm reading their first comprehensive monograph published by Walker Art Center, which has been enjoying a long history with artists. The book is an extensive research into the ephemera of the artists’ forty-year career and include program notes, flyers, performative and editorial photography, video, reviews, and letters. Below a selection of few spreads from Eiko&Koma: Time Is Not Even, Space Is Not Empty.

exhibition: rebirth

It’s been a full decade since Mariko Mori’s last New York museum show, and viewers who remember that exhibition might not even recognize the artist in “Rebirth: Recent Work by Mariko Mori,” at Japan Society. The futuristic fashion plate of Ms. Mori’s earlier photographs and videos — the artist herself, in Manga-inspired get-ups — seems to have vanished, and so has her contemporary Japanese landscape of malls, airports and business districts.

In their place are meditative, abstract sculptures and installations, strongly influenced by Buddhism, theoretical physics, and prehistoric cultures (and also, it often seems, by other contemporary artists like Hiroshi Sugimoto and James Turrell). They make up an ambitious but disappointing show, which summons big ideas and primal energies only to give them trite, New Agey forms. Continue reading

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.