"Portraits"
April 14 to May 12, 2012
ArataniUrano, Tokyo




Installation view of Go Watanabe's "Portraits" at ArataniUrano, Tokyo, 2012. Photo ART iT.


This exhibition of new lightbox works by Go Watanabe inaugurates ArataniUrano's new home in the Shirokane Art Complex, where the gallery has taken over the second-floor space recently vacated by Nanzuka Underground. Watanabe's "Portraits" are all depictions of ethereal, androgynous faces - cropped tightly from base of neck to crown of head - which in the glassy stares of their impossibly oversized, wideset eyes and the milky frost of their porcelain complexions hover unsettlingly between the angelic and the alien. Executed at large scale and arranged at more or less uniform intervals around the circumference of the otherwise gallery, these works suffuse the space in an eerie white light that is amplified by the white walls and white-painted wood flooring. In this way the works both suck viewers into specific details, such as the faint outline of the eyebrows articulated by the underlying structure of the skull, or the volume suggested by the shading between pursed lips, but also repel definition at the same time, the way that especially polished marble does when seen from certain angles and distances, collapsing two- and three-dimensionality. Watanabe stakes an ambivalent position between classicism and critique: is he seeking to update ideal conceptions of human form, or to parody the desire to refract our physical insecurities through unattainable images? Regardless, he seems to be committed to exploring the new implications for representation presented by digital technology, whereby regimes of perfection are no longer contingent upon what the mind can imagine, and rather algorithmically composite the diversity and variability of the existing real into probable - but certainly not inevitable - suppositions of some evolutionary endpoint.

"The Art of Connecting"
February 4 to May 6, 2012
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo




Installation view "Atsuko Tanaka: The Art of Connecting," © Ryoji Ito, Photo ART iT.


The most comprehensive survey of works by Atsuko Tanaka to date, MOT's "The Art of Connecting" is part of an international collaboration with Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and the Espai d'art contemporani de Castelló, both of which hosted the exhibition in mid-to-late 2011. Presenting original works together with archival materials and film footage, the exhibition makes the case for Tanaka as a seminal figure in postwar Japanese art, not only as a member of the historic Gutai group of artists, but also for the singular vision and approach to materials she displayed throughout her career.

This is evident from the earliest works on display, a group of "Calendar Collages" (c 1954) made first with miscellaneous pieces of paper ranging from blueprint to an international bill of lading before shifting to a more severe treatment of numbers sketched onto fabric that has been ripped apart and then glued back together. Also included are two iconic pieces: the sound installation Work (Bell) (1955/2000), a string of bells extending across two galleries and activated into clamorous life by the push of a button; and the Electric Dress (1956) made of colored, exposed light bulbs of various shapes and sizes that have been strung together in a flashing burka-like full-body garment. Lesser known, but no less impressive, is the 16mm film Round on Sand, shot in 1968 in collaboration with the photographer Hiroshi Fukuzawa, which some viewers may remember from the Gutai film archive presentation at the 2008 Yokohama Triennale. Presented here on a monitor, the film finds Tanaka spending a day at the beach, using first chalk and then the end of a pick axe to mark the pier and sand with the circuitry of curvilinear and concentric patterning that became her trademark, and seemingly evolved from the group of drawings and sketches titled "Drawing after Electric Dress" (1956).




Installation view "Atsuko Tanaka: The Art of Connecting," © Ryoji Ito, Photo ART iT.


Concluding with a gallery of paintings spanning the years 1957 to 2004, the exhibition roughly charts three distinct phases, or episodes, in Tanaka's career, from diverse experimentation to the development of a visual language and then the refinement of that language over time. But it also suggests that Tanaka was an artist of such diverse talents - working with fabric and collage and performance and installation and drawing and painting - that she was able to fit multiple careers into one lifetime.



Related:
Photo Report - Atsuko Tanaka: The Art of Connecting

"Darkness in Pink"
March 24 to April 28, 2012
Mujin-to Production, Tokyo




Photo ART iT.


Part of a two-venue exhibition organized in conjunction with Capsule Gallery in Setagaya-ku, "Darkness in Pink" marks the return of Chihiro Mori to Tokyo after her 2008 solo show at Kodama Gallery. Included in critic Midori Matsui's survey of recent Japanese art held at Art Tower Mito in 2007, "The Door into Summer: The Age of Micropop," Mori is part of a loose group of artists who have returned to figurative practice as a way to deconstruct conventions of signification. As evidenced by the works on display, she has spent the hiatus refining her ideas, producing an exhibition that, after an initial retinal impact, slowly shifts into conceptual focus.

Anchoring the display, a new set of medium-sized paintings in acrylic wash on paper clay overlay images of gymnastics performers on colored grounds with a chaos of signatures, icons and sports insignias sampled from sources as diverse as the Kyoto Fire Department to the Detroit Tigers baseball team. Their bodies contorted into strange positions, the disarmingly kitsch images of the performers provide a dynamic axis to each composition, from which the signs radiate or extend in a gestural, disembodied profusion. Produced entirely through manual techniques, these paintings evoke the floating digital space of the computer or television screen, reflected as well in a large painting on the opposite side of the gallery based on footage of a rock concert taken from an NHK broadcast, and seem to imagine in part what would happen if the human body were inserted in that realm beyond physics.

Also included is a large, loosely scrawled wall drawing of the main Japanese islands, the names of the prefectures placed alternately with precision or without any regard for the corresponding position in official maps, as well as a group of quasi-sculptural exercises in which fragments of the details from Japanese banknotes have been enlarged and printed out onto wall-mounted armatures. In tandem with the paintings, these works find Mori fruitfully investigating the schisms between gesture and representation, as well as what happens when locally established symbols begin to circulate beyond their scope of meaning. If this is well-trod painterly territory, Mori brings to it a new sense of timeliness for an era when knowledge is both more diffuse and yet more opaque than ever.




At Capsule Gallery, "Colorful Mud" continues through May 6, featuring photoworks and paintings.

"End of Photography"
December 9, 2011, to January 27, 2012
Gallery Side 2, Tokyo




Installation view of Steven Pippin's "End of Photography" at Gallery Side 2, with Out of Body Experience (2010) in foreground. All images: Photo ART iT.


Inaugurating Gallery Side 2's new space in a former drinks warehouse along a Roppongi backstreet, this exhibition of works by conceptual photographer Steven Pippin questions what would happen if a camera could document the very moment of its own death. Using an exaggeratedly experimental set-up of various calibre guns, a high-speed flash and mirror panels, Pippin has made a series of photographs in which the circuitry of the flash triggered and shutter released by the firing of the gun allows a camera to witness the bullet passing through its casing - the last image it will ever record. Two of these are on view at Side 2, where their clinical aesthetic smartly complements the untreated concrete walls. They are presented alongside a vitrine with an assortment of shattered camera remains and a second case with a recreation of the gun-camera circuit, as well as a group of quasi-abstract images made from exposing the film inside the cameras as the bullets pass through them. Given titles ranging from Mamiya 330 and 5 x 4 de Vere to Deep Field and Untitled [Black Hole], these latter works measure, through the patterns of shadows and textures of shattering parts that crackle their surfaces, the unimaginable but very real physical spaces inside the cameras themselves.





Top: Installation view. Bottom: Detail of Work within a Work (2010).


If there is already something uncanny about a camera taking a photo of itself, as though a device associated with objective observation is inherently governed by an injunction against self-regard (obviously not so for the people behind the cameras), then this sense is amplified and distorted by these fascinating, distracting and ultimately humorous images. Through the positioning of the mirrors in front and back of the camera, Pippin plays upon the photograph's duality as both a means for technical analysis and a medium for illusory projection: we are always bracketed, it seems, by our reflections. As suggested by the title of the case with the gun-camera circuit, Out of Body Experience (2010), at stake here is the desire to see ourselves against the desire to represent ourselves, and the tenuous balance between objectivity and subjectivity. As well, in their fetishistic, forensic accounting of the trajectories of diverse elements in a shared environment at a given time - the coincidence of bullet, camera body, film, lens and control elements such as gun and mirrors - these works subtly ask: how do we account for the events of our lives, which at any moment can dissolve from recognizable forms into delirious abstractions?

"Rise and Fall and New Works"
September 10 - October 15, 2011
Wako Works of Art, Tokyo



Installation view of Rise and Fall (2009) at Wako Works of Art, Tokyo, 2011. Photo ART iT.


An overview of recent works by Fiona Tan, this exhibition centers on Rise and Fall (2009), an absorbing two-channel video weaving together fleeting vignettes of a middle-aged woman and a younger woman going through their respective daily routines, interspersed with images of gardens, streams and Niagara Falls. Tan's distinctive use of the multi-channel wide-screen format, with the projections standing vertically and placed side by side, allows for virtuoso double-camera work, as in an opening sequence with the middle-aged woman lying in bed, in which the slight variations in angle, focus, proximity and movement between the parallel images imbues even the most dormant activity with an air of restlessness. In other cases the juxtaposition of different images balances ambivalently between the connotation of dream sequences, flashbacks and simultaneous action, neatly toying with film convention without gratuitously flouting its logic. Is the older woman recalling her younger self, or imagining the life of a lost or estranged daughter, or vice versa, or none of the above? Tan's aesthetic of misalignment, of subtle rifts in image, sound and texture, keeps everything from succumbing to the potential clichés of moody atmospherics.

Unusually, the newest work in exhibition is placed on a side gallery, and presented on a monitor: Hans & Helge (2011) enters the home of a pair of championship dog breeders. Also included are a new sound piece, Brendan's Isle (2010), reinterpreting the Irish folk tale, "The Voyage of Saint Brendan," and the black-and-white landscape photograph Närsholmen V (2008).

'HANAWANDER - Liberation -'
January 15 - February 19, 2011
Zenshi, Tokyo






Both: Installation view of "HANAWANDER - Liberation -" at Zenshi, Tokyo, 2011. Photo ART iT.


Possessing one of Tokyo's more characteristic gallery spaces - located in a two-story single-unit building overshadowed by the Kanda area's drab office high-rises, and with the sliding doors of the ground level exhibition space thrown open to the elements - Zenshi is known for his program of eclectic, outsider-style artists. Closing Feb 19, Masayoshi Hanawa's solo show "HANAWANDER - Liberation -" is a mesmerizing example of this aesthetic. Hanawa has filled the gallery with works on paper and an installation of various sized and shaped cardboard boxes that spills out from a back corner of the space. Using thickly applied crayon, Hanawa depicts on both the sheets of paper and the boxes different characters from his own cosmology of imagined monsters, which he calls "Hanawanders." However, combined with the eccentricity of this vision, his eye for detail and complex patterning pushes this project beyond pure illustration - a point reflected not only in the fractal compositions of his drawings but also in the grids and spills of his exhibition layout.

Quilted patchworks of primary-colored geometric shapes and astral bends fronted by orange squid-shaped monsters, pink blob-shaped monsters, little-green-man-shaped monsters, child-shaped monsters, elephant-man shaped monsters and even quilted-geometric-pathwork-shaped monsters, these works proliferate infinite variations of form to engagingly mindless effect, much like the votive art of religious traditions ranging from Islamic abstraction to Aztec symbolism and Hindu and Buddhist sculpture and paintings. In Hanawa's case, the waxy, pastel opacity of this private cosmology approximates the visual equivalent of speaking in tongues, or indeed the monstrous liberation of making sounds without referents.

Tadashi Kawamata
'Field Sketch: Tadashi Kawamata Early Photo Works'
February 4 - March 21, 2011
NADiff a/p/a/r/t, Tokyo

Misaki Kawai
'Enpitsu Taisou'
February 5 - March 12, 2011
Take Ninagawa, Tokyo




Tadashi Kawamata - Field Sketch (2010) by edition nord.


With not one but two exhibitions in Tokyo related to their publications, the independent art press schtucco/edition nord are currently enjoying some well-earned visibility. At NADiff a/p/a/r/t, the basement gallery of the eponymous art book distributors in Ebisu, "Field Sketch: Tadashi Kawamata Early Photo Works" features a wall-sized grid of snapshots taken by the artist in his early 20s. The exhibition title is self-explanatory: small format prints, these photos find Kawamata investigating architectural exteriors and interiors, land forms and street scenes, all themes that seemingly have gone on to inform his practice of structural interventions into the daily environment. On a facing wall of this small space is a ledge with a sample of edition nord's handsome three-part boxed set of reproductions of the photos, printed on card stock in colors that exactingly reflect the faded tones of the vintage prints. Grouped under the headings "Suspended Room," "Found Objects" and "Reflection and Transmission" and presented in loose piles, these replicas are fun to thumb through, and exaggerate the anachronism of their original counterparts in an age when such fieldwork is now conducted almost entirely in digital formats, often never to escape the confines of the hard drive.




Misaki Kawai - Installation view of "Enpitsu Taisou" at Take Ninagawa, Tokyo, 2011. Photo ART iT.


At Higashi-Azabu's Take Ninagawa, "Enpitsu Taisou" is a site-specific installation by Misaki Kawai, who over the past year has been making over a drawing a day for her eponymous, 500-page artist book (entitled Pencil Exercise in English). Here, a selection of 123 framed, notepad-sized drawings made for the book are arranged in a grid conforming to Kawai's wall-painting of gargantuan, multicolored pencils that encircle the space at different levels. As with Kawamata, these works capture a point in the artistic process where ideas and execution ambiguously overlap. Some drawings suggest studies for Kawai's uniquely ribald take on portraiture, as with one non-sequitor piece depicting a woman whose breasts spill out of her aerobics outfit. Others record progressions of language play, with bastardized variations on brand names and logos like "Nice." In the center of the installation, a free-standing oversized bricollage sculpture of an open book serves as a projection surface for a short animation inspired by the drawings, evoking the creative loop that feeds back from one project to the next. Available at the gallery, the book itself is enjoyably straightforward, with one drawing per page and no text aside from end credits.

February 9 - May 9, 2011
The National Art Center, Tokyo




Installation view, projections of Luis Buñuel's L'Âge d'or (1930) at left and Un chien andalou (1929) at right, on display in "Le Surréalisme" at the National Art Center, Tokyo, 2011. Photo ART iT.


Having gone to the lengths of creating a unique website with interactive Twitter-feed features and a tie-in with the French puppy characters Gaspard et Lisa to make the content more accessible to a broader audience, Tokyo's National Art Center clearly has blockbuster expectations for its just-opened exhibition of works from the Centre Pompidou collection, "Le Surréalisme." However, these bells and whistles do nothing to detract from the exhibition itself, which with its impressive selection of 173 pieces and polished installation balancing intimate, spotlighted hangings with expansive gallery vistas more than justifies braving the inevitable crowds.

Beginning with a Dada prelude via a room that includes Marcel Duchamp's readymade Bottle Rack (1914/64) and a stylish 1914 Giorgio de Chirico portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire reimagined as a sunglasses-sporting classical bust tightly cropped against a predominantly green background, the exhibition kicks off in earnest with an almost votive display of an original copy of André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto (1924). It then unfolds chronologically in five-to-10-year periods through to 1966, broken down into themes such as "Le temps menacants" (Threatening weather, presumably after René Magritte's painting of the same name, despite its absence here) and "Surrealism in Exile." In this way, most of the movement's key exponents are represented by numerous works from different points in their careers, with photos by Man Ray, films by Luis Buñuel and canvases by Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró and Magritte, as well as the latter's irreverent life-scale bronze coffin-cum-sofa first depicted in his 1951 painting of the same name, Madame Récamier de David (1967).

To the extent that the organizers have painted Surrealism's history in the broad strokes typical to such a touring show, they have also singled-out for more in-depth presentations works on paper by André Masson and Victor Brauner. The generous time span also allows for the inclusion of more marginal contributions to the Surrealist oeuvre, namely the frenetic, primitivist composition Jackson Pollock made under the influence of Masson, The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle (1943), while interspersed throughout the galleries, vitrines containing archival materials provide an indication of the volume of the innovative writing and graphics inspired by the movement, as in the case of a pamphlet for a Surrealist exhibition at Tokyo's Nishiginza Nihon Salon in June 1937 - a striking reminder with its bold, green font and rush of information that what goes around, comes around.

'possibility in portraiture'
May 14 - June 12, 2010
Taro Nasu, Tokyo



whom? whose? II - 1F (2010), type C print, 51.5 x 61.7 cm (framed), edition of 8. Image © Maiko Haruki 2010, courtesy TARO NASU.


Exploring the technological possibilities of the medium, Maiko Haruki turns photography into a form of conceptual practice. Made with analog instead of digital methods and distinguished by their exaggerated contrast, her works obscure the visibility of her subjects, requiring viewers to appreciate them through careful observation. Filled with an inherent sense of tension, these works inspire admiration for the artist's painstaking methods of production.

On display in her current exhibition at Taro Nasu are photographs that Haruki has shot over the past two years. In the "Outer Portrait" series, the subjects of Haruki's photographs are both identifiable and yet partially concealed. For these works, Haruki traveled to tourist spots and then conscientiously removed the particular characteristics of the locations from her compositions. However, the almost accidental retention in the images of details like veils and figures suggestive of Islamic motifs also underscores the idea that these "portraits" take on significance from their settings. Because the details in these predominantly minimal images are extremely specific, they resist any tendency towards universality. The question is whether this is merely arbitrary. It may be because there are so few works on display, but it seems entirely possible that this effect arises unintentionally. Regardless, one has the sense that "Outer Portrait" lacks the broad inquiry into the mechanics of image making that had been apparent in previous series exploring the effacement of the material and physical attributes of photographic subjects.

In contrast, the series "whom? whose?" deals not so much with the characteristics of specific locations as it does with the way that use of contrast and composition can erode any sense of geography from an image. In this series, Haruki superbly transforms her chosen locations into settings without contexts. Framing labyrinthine passages and walls in a way that flattens perspective but still communicates architectural depth, Haruki plays upon the inherent familiarity of the images in capturing the uncanny transition zone that lies at the intersections of public and private space.

'The Tropics: view from the middle of the globe'
March 13 - June 12, 2010
The Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok



Vong Phaophanit - Still from the video installation All That's Solid Melts into Air (2005/06). © Vong Phaophanit.


Held in Paris in 1989, curator Jean-Hubert Martin's exhibition "Magiciens de la Terre" was a watershed reconsideration of Euro-American Modernism's hierarchical view of world culture. Including 50 artists from the West and 50 artists from the rest of the world, the exhibition attempted to present all on equal footing. While the exhibition has since undergone much-deserved critique, it helped usher in the current globalization of contemporary art.

Currently on view at Bangkok's Jim Thompson Art Center after having made stops in Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town and Berlin, "The Tropics: view from the middle of the globe" is a latter-day response to "Magiciens." Instead of working across a geographical divide, the exhibition attempts to reconsider the European concept of "the tropics" from both "native" and "foreign" viewpoints, as well as through both historical and contemporary works.

Works on display in the Bangkok version of the exhibition, which has been condensed from prior iterations, range from German Marcel Odenbach's roving video tour through the backstreets of Calcutta, Disturbed Places (2007), to Singaporean Sherman Ong`s study of teacher-pupil relations between two classical Javanese dancers, Exodus (2005), and a selection of 20th-century woven fabrics from countries including Ghana, Guatemala, Panama and the Golden Triangle region of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand.

Curated by Alfons Hug, Peter Junge and Viola König (all of whom are German), the exhibition ultimately takes an ambivalent stance toward its subject. Does it reinforce the Eurocentrism of the original cliché of "the tropics," or does it rehabilitate that cliché into a new platform for discovering sympathies between different geographic and temporal contexts? The scope of the theme seems a little outsized for the smallish venue, although Jim Thompson's legacy as an American expatriate who revitalized - and reinvented - the Thai silk industry adds a level of local resonance to the issues under consideration.