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© Odawara Art Foundation.

Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto's reinterpretation of the classic bunraku puppet play Sonezaki shinju (The Love Suicides at Sonezaki) will be touring Europe with support of the Japan Foundation and the Odawara Art Foundation, it was announced May 15.

First presented in August 2011 at the Kanagawa Arts Theatre Hall in Yokohama, the production Sugimoto Bunraku: Sonezaki shinju tsuketari Kannon meguri ("Kannon Pilgrimage" from the Love Suicides at Sonezaki) was met with wide acclaim in Japan. Incorporating new art and stage design as well as video elements conceived by Sugimoto, and a new score by Living National Treasure Seiji Tsurusawa, the production provides a uniquely contemporary take on the tragic love story scripted by the bunraku playwright Chikamatsu.

With its theme of the "impossible love" between the clerk of a soy sauce merchant and a courtesan being realized in the afterlife, Chikamatsu's play inspired a wave of suicides among young lovers when it debuted in the feudal Edo period. In 1723, the Tokugawa shogunate banned all performances of the production, which would not be revived until 1955. As a result, the original intonations of the lines and the handling of the puppets were almost entirely lost to history, save for the script by Chikamatsu and movement diagrams by the puppet master Tatsumatsu Hachirobei. While adding a contemporary sensibility, Sugimoto has worked as hard as possible to recreate the play's premiere production from 1703, including the use of one-man puppeteering, as opposed to the three-man puppeteering common to today's bunraku.

The Sugimoto production's European tour is being arranged as part of commemorations of the 400th anniversary of relations between Japan and Spain, and will premiere in Madrid on Sep 27-28 of this year. From there it will travel to Rome, Oct 4-5 at Teatro Argentina, and conclude in Paris, Oct 10-19, as part of the Festival d'Automne.


Related:
Hiroshi Sugimoto tries hand at puppetry

The philosopher and former president of Osaka University, Kiyokazu Washida has been appointed as the director of the Sendai Mediatheque in Sendai. Born in Kyoto in 1949, Washida specializes in clinical philosophy and ethics, but has also written about aesthetics as well. He joined Osaka University as an associate professor in 1992 and became the president of the same in 2007. In September 2011 he joined the philosophy faculty of Otani University. Major works include "Kiku" koto no chikara - Rinshou tetsugaku shiron (The Power of Listening: An Essay on Clinical Philosophy), awarded the Kuwabara Takeo Prize in 2000, and Modo no meikyu (The Labyrinth of Fashion), which received the Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities, History and Civilization in 1989.

On April 29, a talk event with Sendai mayor Emiko Okuyama will be held on the occasion of Washida assuming his new position. Addressing the theme "The Age of Followership," the pair will discuss social issues, the possibilities for dialogue and collaboration, and youth participation in society after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster of March 11, 2011.

For more information:
http://www.smt.city.sendai.jp/

Toyo Ito has been awarded the 2013 Pritzker Architecture Prize, it was announced Mar 17. Ito is the sixth Japanese architect to win the prize, after Kenzo Tange, Fumihiko Maki, Tadao Ando and Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA.
In its citation, the Pritzker jury praised Ito for developing and perfecting "a personal architectural syntax, which combines structural and technical ingenuity with formal clarity." Projects mentioned in the jury citation include the commercial TOD's building in Tokyo, the multipurpose public facility Sendai Mediatheque, and the "Home-for-All" project to build communal spaces for those affected by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011 - a collaborative project with other architects that was awarded the Golden Lion for best national pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale.
This is just the latest recognition for Ito, who was also honored with the Praemium Imperiale in 2010, the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2006, and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 8th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2002. He will receive USD 100,000 and a bronze medalion at an award ceremony to be held May 29. Members of the jury included the architects Alejandro Aravena, Yung Ho Chang, Glenn Murcott and Juhani Pallasmaa.


Related:
Feature: Toyo Ito: Architecture of Involvement

Photo Report: Architecture. Possible Here? Home-for-All

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2013, designed by Sou Fujimoto / Indicative CGI. © Sou Fujimoto Architects, courtesy Serpentine Gallery, London.


Architect Sou Fujimoto will design this year's Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London's Kensington Gardens, it was announced Feb 14.
At 41, Fujimoto is the youngest architect to accept the prestigious commission from one of the UK's premier contemporary art institutions. He joins the ranks of previous participants including Zaha Hadid (2000), Toyo Ito (2002), Oscar Niemeyer (2003), Frank Gehry (2008) and Kazuyo Sejima & Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA (2009). Fujimoto has proposed a cloud-like, latticed structure made of 20mm steel poles, such that it blends into the surrounding landscape. Forming an irregular ring shape, the structure will have a footprint of 350 square-meters.
In a statement, Fujimoto explained, "I propose an architectural landscape: a transparent terrain that encourages people to interact with and explore the site in diverse ways. Within the pastoral context of Kensington Gardens, I envisage the vivid greenery of the surrounding plant life woven together with a constructed geometry. A new form of environment will be created, where the natural and the man-made merge; not solely architectural nor solely natural, but a unique meeting of the two."
Known for exploring organic structures such as the forest, nest and cave, Fujimoto envisions that the pavilion "will create a geometric, cloud-like form, as if it were mist rising from the undulations of the park."

For more on Fujimoto, see ART iT's interview with him on the occasion of his participation in the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale:

Sou Fujimoto: Ideas from the Body

The Tokyo-based Singaporean photographer Leslie Kee has been arrested in Tokyo on obscenity charges, it was reported Feb 4. Internationally known for his celebrity portraits of music icons like Yumi Matsutoya, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, as well as for sexually charged photographs of male models, Kee is currently holding an exhibition of photographs at the gallery hiromiyoshii roppongi. Along with the gallery director, Hiromi Yoshii, and another member of the gallery staff, Kee is accused of selling books that violate Japan's obscenity laws against the distribution, sale or public display of obscene writings, pictures or other materials. According to reports, Yoshii admits to having sold the books but denies that they are in violation of the obscenity laws. The books in question reportedly feature more than 50 pages of exposed male genitalia. Typically in Japan, images of genitalia are pixelated or otherwise obscured in order for pornographic content to circumvent the obscenity laws.

A co-founder of the post-war avant-garde group, the Gutai Art Association, the artist Shozo Shimamoto died Jan 25 of sudden heart failure at hospital in Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture, it has been reported. He was 85.
Shimamoto was born in Osaka in 1928, and graduated from the Kwansei Gakuin University. He was among the artists who founded the Gutai Art Association in 1954, and is credited with proposing the group's name. Stretching the boundaries between painting and performance, he became known for paintings made by projecting paint onto the canvas from a handmade canon. He was also president of Able Art Japan, the Japanese Association for Disabled Artists.
Shimamoto's passing comes on the heels of a comprehensive survey of the Gutai group held in 2012 at the National Art Center, Tokyo, and just weeks before the Feb 15 opening of "Gutai: Splendid Playground," a large-scale survey at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

One of the leading voices of Japanese post-war avant-garde cinema, the film director Nagisa Oshima, died Dec 15 at hospital in Fujisawa, Kanagawa Prefecture, due to complications arising from pneumonia. He was 80 years old.

Oshima was born in Kyoto in 1932. He first became involved in theatre while studying at Kyoto University, where he was also chairman of the leftist Kyoto Prefecture Federation of Student Self-Governing Associations. After graduating from university, he was hired in 1954 by the film company Shochiku-Ofuna, where he completed his first films, the short Ashita no taiyou (Tomorrow's Sun) and the feature Ai to kibou no machi (A Town of Love and Hope), in 1959.

From the start Oshima's films explored a heady mix of disaffected youth culture, radical politics, sex, violence and Japanese identity. In 1960, Seishun zankoku monogatari (Cruel Story of Youth) was Oshima's first hit, earning him newcomer of the year honors from the Directors Guild of Japan. However, that same year Oshima's critical appraisal of his experiences in the Kyoto student movement, Nihon no yoru to kiri (Night and Fog in Japan), was pulled from circulation by Shochiku after only four days of screenings over concerns about the film's sensitivity in the wake of the assassination of Japanese Socialist Party leader Inejiro Asanuma by a young right-wing extremist during a live, televised political debate in Tokyo. The suppression of his film prompted Oshima to leave Shochiku and start his own production company.

This was followed with a turn by Oshima toward television production, which continued until the mid-1960s, when he released a series of films reflecting on the nature of democratic governance and society in Japan, including Etsuraku (The Pleasures of the Flesh, 1965), Hakuchu no tourima (Violence at High Noon, 1966) and Nihon shunka-kou (Sing a Song of Sex: A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs, 1967). Working with the pioneering Art Theatre Guild, Oshima also made films such as Koushikei (Death by Hanging, 1968), Shonen (Boy, 1969) and Gishiki (The Ceremony, 1971).

After this flurry of creativity, Oshima slowed in his pace of production, although the works made between 1970 and 1999 include some of his most internationally recognized, namely the French-Japanese co-production Ai no corrida (In the Realm of the Senses, 1976), notable for its use of explicit sex in depicting the events around the 1936 Sada Abe incident, and the loose sequel Ai no bourei (Empire of Passion, 1978). The latter earned Oshima the award for Best Director at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival. Released in 1983, the British-Japanese co-production Senjou no meri Kurisumasu (Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence), starring the musicians David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto, and the comedian Takeshi Kitano, in a story of cross-cultural, homoerotic and hierarchical tensions set in a Japanese-run prisoner of war camp during World War II, has also become a cult classic.

Suffering a stroke in 1996, Oshima directed his final film, Gohatto (Taboo, 1999), from a wheelchair. In 2000 he was conferred the Purple Ribbon Medal of Honor for academic and artistic achievement. He is survived by his wife, the actress Akiko Koyama, who appeared in some of his most memorable films.

One of Japan's most distinguished photographers, Shomei Tomatsu, died of complications from pneumonia at a hospital in Naha, Okinawa, on Dec 14, 2012, it has been revealed. He was 82 years old.

Known for investigating the landscape of postwar Japan, from the aftereffects of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki to the socio-cultural impact of US military bases in Okinawa, Tomatsu was born in 1930 in Nagoya. After joining the production staff of Iwanami Shashin Bunko in 1954, he began his freelance career in 1956, and formed with Eikoh Hosoe, Ikko Narahara and others the photographic cooperative Vivo in 1959. Entering the 1960s, he introduced a new approach to documentary photography through series like "Occupied Japan" and "Houses," and began to publish the first of numerous photo books, beginning with Nagasaki 11:02 (1961). In 1972 he spent a year in Naha and an additional seven months in Miyakojima, both in Okinawa Prefecture. Along with those shot in Southeast Asia, the photographs from this period were collected in the book The Pencil of the Sun, published in 1975.

In the 1990s and 2000s Tomatsu had solo exhibitions at institutions including the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, Nagoya Museum of Art and the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. Additionally, a survey organized in 2006 by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art received wide acclaim in the United States.

Artist Yasumasa Morimura has been appointed artistic director of the 5th Yokohama Triennale, it was announced Dec 18. The exhibition will be held in 2014, giving Morimura more than a year to prepare.

Although Morimura is not widely known for curatorial activity, his mixed-media photographs, videos and installations reflect a research intensive practice and a critical eye toward Japanese and international art history. The Osaka-based Morimura is the second artist to helm the Triennale, following Tadashi Kawamata in 2005. After significant delays, Kawamata was a last-minute replacement for the originally appointed director, architect Arata Isozaki.

The inaugural Triennale in 2001 was directed by a committee of leading Japanese curators including Shinji Kohmoto and Fumio Nanjo, while the third edition in 2008 featured an all-star trio of international curators - Daniel Birnbaum, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Beatrix Ruf - alongside Japanese peers. Held in 2011, the most recent edition of the Triennale, which was downsized in both scale and budget, was led by the Paris-based curator of Palais de Tokyo, Akiko Miki.

The Japanese architects SANAA, Shigeru Ban and Toyo Ito are among a star-studded list of candidates to design the M+ museum in Hong Kong, it was announced Dec 10 by the West Kowloon Cultural Cultural District Authority (WKCDA). Scheduled for completion in 2017, M+ is envisioned as an interdisciplinary museum for 20th and 21st century visual culture, home to galleries, performance spaces, screening rooms, an education center, archive library, artist-in-residence studios and other facilities. The institution will be sited in a 14 hectare park on the waterfront of Victoria Harbour, with plans calling for a 60,000 square-meter building that can accommodate 15,000 square-meters of exhibition space. The other architects on the six-team shortlist are Herzog & de Meuron, Renzo Piano and SNOHETTA.

Reflecting the institution's emphasis on its identity as a museum for the Hong Kong people, rooted in the city and its unique culture, the executive director of M+, Lars Nittve, said in a statement to the press, "We are thrilled with this phenomenal shortlist. Our concept for M+ is a museum built from the inside out around its content and core values. I am really looking forward to seeing designs that reflect this, that respond to the unique needs of a museum for visual culture here and beyond, and a design worthy of Hong Kong’s fast growing cultural scene." Although it does not yet have a physical space, M+ is already active producing events and buying works for its permanent collection. The institution made waves earlier this year when it announced the USD 22.7 million acquisition of 47 works of Chinese contemporary art from the collection of Uli Sigg, with an additional 1,463 works donated outright by the Swiss collector.

Nittve and Sigg are both members of the M+ jury panel, which is headed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Rafael Moneo and also includes Kathy Halbreich of New York's Museum of Modern Art and William Lim, the Hong Kong architect and art patron, among others. The finalist for the design of M+ will be appointed in June 2013.

Also Dec 10, the WKCDA announced that architects Bing Thom and Ronald Lu will partner to design the 13,800 square-meter Xiqu Centre, the West Kowloon Cultural District's venue for Chinese Opera, scheduled to open in 2016. If everything proceeds on schedule, the Xiqu Centre will be the first of 17 core arts and cultural venues to open in the district.