Contemporary Kogei Art Craft, Kanazama, Japan, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art

Art Crafting Towards the Future
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan
Curator: AKIMOTO Yuji, Museum’s Director
April 28 - August 4, 2012

Artwork by MITSUKE Masayasu, Untitled, 2009
Courtesy of Ota Fine Arts
Private collection
Image Courtesy of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

Since becoming director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan, in 2007, Yuji AKIMOTO has had contact with the vital spirit of Kanazawa's kôgei

Art Crafting towards the Future inquires into the contemporary validity of kôgei (Japanese artisan craft) and universalness of its appeal. The exhibition, this is to say, asks: Is kôgei an art genre expressive of our times, capable of speaking to people everywhere? Like other visual media, today’s kôgei is subject to the post-modern trends of the times. Like animation, manga, design, and contemporary art, it is an expressive medium used to create compelling new images. To this end, it employs methods specific to kôgei, and it references kôgei’s historical vision. Yet, today’s kôgei takes a clearly different approach from past kôgei.
In its visual imagery, for example, today’s kôgei resonates with animation, manga, design, and contemporary art—genres from which it has previously stood apart. In its attitude towards exhibiting, as well—while exhibit methods differ contingent on the creativity of each artist—today’s kôgei is turned to face the world at large. There is, thus, a clear trend of kôgei artists working in widely varying styles who are showing their works as art of the present day.
For this exhibition, I would like to refer to kôgei work of such character as “futurist,” in the sense of “kôgei of a new age” and “future-oriented kôgei.” The exhibits by the 12 featured artists are all kôgei, but I would like viewers to see and enjoy them as today’s art."

AKIMOTO Yuji, Director of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Exhibition’s curator

CONTEMPORARY KOGEI FEATURED ARTISTS
AOKI Katsuyo, b. 1972, Tokyo
HAYAMA Yuki, b. 1961, Arita, Saga
IKURA Takashi, b. 1962, Toki, Gifu
KITAMURA Tatsuo, b. 1952, Wajima, Ishikawa. Unryuan (lacquer craft studio)
KUWATA Takuro, b. 1981, Fukuyama, Hiroshima
MITSUKE Masayasu, b. 1975, Kaga, Ishikawa
NAKAMURA Kohei, b. 1948, Kanazawa, Ishikawa
NAKAMURA Shinkyo, b. 1957, Fukuoka
NOGUCHI Harumi, b. 1948, Tokyo
OHI Toshio, b. 1958, Kanazawa, Ishikawa
TAKEMURA Yuri, b. 1980, Nagoya, Aichi
YAMAMURA Shinya, b. 1960, Chofu, Tokyo

Art Crafting towards the Future is organized by the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan (Kanazawa Art Promotion and Development Foundation)

21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan
Museum's Website: www.kanazawa21.jp

Tokujin Yoshioka: Waterfall, SCAF Sydney – A major exhibition on view in Australia

Tokujin Yoshioka: Waterfall
Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation  SCAF, Sydney, Through 17 December, 2011

TOKUJIN YOSHIOKA: Waterfall is a major solo exhibition developed by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF). This exhibition is exclusive to Sydney. Waterfall explores the work of endlessly inventive Japanese artist Tokujin Yoshioka. Known for the simplicity and ingenuity of his concepts and holistic approach to design, Tokujin Yoshioka’s interdisciplinary practice has garnered him much attention since founding his eponymous studio in Tokyo in 2000. Tokujin Yoshioka experiments with a sophisticated play of materials and shapes using his art as a means of communicating something fascinating, surprising, joyful and unexpected. SCAF has invited Tokujin to create an extraordinary installation, transforming the gallery space and giving Australian audiences the opportunity to view the work of this influential contemporary artist.

TOKUJIN YOSHIOKA
Waterfall, 2005
Courtesy and © Tokujin Yoshioka. Courtesy of SCAF, Sydney.

Born in Japan in 1967, Tokujin Yoshioka’s professional career is rooted in the fruitful collaboration with Shiro Kuramata and Issey Miyake. The ten-year association with the renowned fashion designer has produced numerous important projects including Issey Miyake Making Things at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris (1998). Tokujin Yoshioka has collaborated with various companies inside and outside Japan including Hermès, BMW, Toyota and Swarovski. His works are held in permanent collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Recent exhibitions include Sensing Nature, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2010), and Glasstress 2011, a collateral event of the 54th Venice Biennale. He also directed Second Nature at 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT (2008). Water blocks, optical glass benches designed by Tokujin Yoshioka in 2002, have been permanently installed at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, in the Impressionist gallery where masterpieces of Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Renoir are displayed (Orsay museum reopened after renovation on October 20, 2011). This is the artist’s first visit to Australia.

An exhibition catalogue is published on the occasion of Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka’s inaugural Australian exhibition at Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation. Authors: Gene Sherman, AM, Chair and Executive Director of SCAF - Dolla S. Merrillees, General Manager,  Artistic & Educational Programmes, SCAF - Mami Kataoka, Chief curator, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, and International Associate Curator, Hayward Gallery, London. Published by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, 2011, 96 pages, 220 x 155 mm, full colour, hardback with dust jacket.

Tokujin Yoshioka: Waterfall is supported by Japan Foundation, SPACE Furniture and Nelson Meers Foundation.

Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation
Sydney NSW 2021 Australia
www.sherman-scaf.org.au 

Tokujin Yoshioka website: www.tokujin.com

Body and Soul - Art works from Hara Museum Collection, Japan

Body and Soul - Selections from the Hara Museum Collection
Hara Museum ARC, Gunma-ken, Japan
September 17, 2011 - January 4, 2012 

The expression “body and soul” has had a long tradition of use in America, among other countries, appearing in countless titles of songs and movies. In Japan the expression has also become a common one that is mainly encountered in music. On display in the contemporary art galleries are works selected from the Hara Museum Collection with “body and soul” as the keyword. The body has been compared to many things; for example, a container for the soul or a shell for the spirit. Some view the body and soul as being one and the same thing, or the body as a medium through which the self interacts with others and the surrounding world. 

Mickalene Thomas, Mama Bush : One of a Kind Two, 2009 

Photo courtesy of the Hara Museum ARC, Gunma-ken

We in this media age experience the body with its expanded capabilities made possible by various tools and technologies. In some of some of the paintings, photographs, sculptures and other works on display, the body is clearly the subject; in others it is not. Nonetheless, it is hoped that their myriad expressions will inspire viewers to consider anew the connection between the body and the spirit and what the body means to them. 

Izumi Kato, Untitled, 2006 

Photo courtesy of the Hara Museum ARC, Gunma-ken

Featured artists: Izumi Kato (photo), Yayoi Kusama, Ushio Shinohara, Tabaimo, Miwa Yanagi, Tomoko Yoneda, William Kentridge, Laurie Simmons, Mickalene Thomas (photo) and others

Hara Museum ARC, Gunma-ken, Japan 
Galleries A, B and C
Web site: www.haramuseum.or.jp

Yuichi Higashionna, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York

Exhibition : Yuichi Higashionna

Fluorescent

Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York

Through February 12, 2011

An exhibition of new work by YUICHI HIGASHIONNA is on view at the Marianne Boesky Gallery. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York, following a project room show in 2008.

YUICHI HIGASHIONNA’s installations are comprised of fluorescent light sculptures, paintings, and reverberating stripes inspired by interior design of 1970s Japan, and fanshii culture – that which is odd, cute, diminutive, and frequently tacky. The artist is particularly interested in exploring the excess, ostentation and domestic kitsch that developed out of Japan’s admiration and desire for Western cultural appropriation following the war. As a result, his works are a tribute to these themes, and may be seen in part as a satirical commentary on Japanese aesthetics, or as a symbol for the re-building and revitalization of post-Hiroshima Japan. Higashionna pursues installations that are familiar in their materials and individual components, yet presents them in a base, halting manner.

In the main gallery, YUICHI HIGASHIONNA combines his fluorescent sculptures along with paintings inspired by street graffiti, Op art, and fanshii. These paintings are installed atop textured wallpaper that looks as though the wall itself is peeling away. Each work is illuminated from below by a tubular fluorescent bulb that provides a pervasive light. These disparate elements, while familiar, are here stylized and haunting in their amalgamations.

Juxtaposed with the paintings are the artist’s sculptural constructions composed of everyday Japanese fluorescent lights. Simple in structure and utilitarian in nature, YUICHI HIGASHIONNA uses circular bulbs, common to private residences, as the foundation for a large-scale chandelier and a vertical chain of lights mounted on the wall. The resulting sculptures are a paradox of elegant light forms and dangling exposed electrical wires. This “un-finished” presentation with its alien glow further highlights the strange that exists within the quotidian.

Other elements in the show – the black striped walls, the elastic lattice wall piece, the crude mobiles of Venetian black glass, and the sculptures constructed of colorful acrylic-framed mirrors – explore the borders and boundaries created between interior and exterior, contributing to a sense of the simultaneously familiar and the uncanny that pervades Higashionna’s practice.

YUICHI HIGASHIONNA lives and works in Tokyo. In 2010, he was included in the exhibition The New Décor at the Hayward Gallery in London and had solo shows at the Berengo Akatsu Collection, Japan, Nadiff Gallery 2F, Japan, and Gallery EXIT in Hong Kong. His work was featured at The Sculpture Garden Museum VANGEI MUSEO in 2009, a solo exhibition at Yumiko Chiba Associates in 2008, and at Comme des Garçons’ flagship store in 2006.

2011 EXHIBITIONS at the Marianne Boesky Gallery

DWELLING, group show, February 3 - March 26, 2011 in the gallery’s uptown location: 118 East 64th Street - New York

SUE DE BEER, Depiction of a Star Obscured by Another Figure, February 18 - March 19, 2011 (509 W 24 S)

HANNAH VAN BART, March 31 - April 30, 2011 (509 W 24 S)

PROJECT SPACE: JESSE CHAPMAN AND DAVID SCANAVINO, March 31 - April 23, 2011 (509 W 24 S)

SALVATORE SCARPITTA, May 6 - June 11, 2011 (509 W 24 S)

MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY

509 West 24th Street

between 10th and 11th Avenues

NEW YORK, NY 10011 - USA

www.marianneboeskygallery.com

Nobuyoshi Araki, Love and Death at Museo d’Arte Lugano

Araki, Love and Death 
Museo d’Arte Lugano
October 23 - February 20, 2010

© NOBUYOSHI ARAKI, A’s Lovers, s.d.
Courtesy the artist and Yoshiko Isshiki Office, Tokyo

 

NOBUYOSHI ARAKI ranks today as one of the most well-known and celebrated artist photographers in the world with more than four hundred publications to his name. Despite his great celebrity, Araki Love and Death is one of only a very few retrospectives dedicated to him in Europe. 

Nobuyoshi Araki's photography expresses and updates many of the themes most closely connected to Japanese culture. The Lugano exhibition bears witness to the artist's work in its many varied expressions: in addition to the autobiographical series – including Sentimental Journey/Winter Journey, which documents the relationship between the artist and his wife Yoko from the day of their marriage till the tragic illness and premature death of Yoko in 1990– urban landscapes, the suggestive images of flowers and food, the poetic series dedicated to the sky and, of course, the series of female nudes and bondage which are, more than any other of his subjects, so clearly linked to his renown. 

From this short list of subjects it is clear just how much Araki's work expresses Japanese culture, in the exaltation of the changing of the seasons, the ephemeral beauty of flowers, and of feminine sensuality. The artist's work is not limited to a simple registration of these subjects, but they make evident and almost tangible, even to a Western audience, the perturbing character that they have in Japanese culture. 

The exhibition mirrors Araki's urgency to capture the continuous transformation of reality, through a continuous photographic documentation. The display features nearly two thousand medium and large format pictures alongside an impressive installation of three thousand Polaroids taken by the artist over the years are presented in a highly dense, mosaic format. The audience is both overwhelmed and disoriented by the visual impact created not only by the single shots, but by the greater whole of the images. 

Finally, and perhaps what makes the Lugano exhibition unique, is the showing of his latest works, including the series dedicated to his beloved cat Chiro and a series of large format photographs over which the artist intervenes with calligraphy, paint and collage which is presented here to the public for the first time.

Museo d'Arte Lugano
Villa Malpensa
Riva Caccia 5
CH-6900 Lugano

www.mdam.ch