2008 marks the 350th anniversary of the birth of Edo period artist Korin Ogata, who founded an innovative, ornamental school of painting and crafts called "Rinha". Rinha was not a hereditary school of art that carried on over generations, but rather the manifestation of Ogata's personal idolization of artists such as Koetsu Honami, Sotatsu Tawaraya and Hoichi Sakai. This exhibition features stellar works by 6 artists who informed the aesthetics of the Rinha school - Koetsu Honami, Sotatsu Tawaraya, Hoichi Sakai, Korin Ogata, Kenzan Ogata and Kiichi Suzuki. Through a comparison of works on the same theme, tracing the genealogy of the Rinha school in concrete terms, this exhibition hopes to bring to light the individual singularity of each artist. On display are paintings, calligraphy, crafts and so on.

Sri Lanka is an island nation boasting a rich cultural heritage reaching back more than 2000 years. This exhibition features items revealing the essence of Sri Lankan culture, such as images of Buddhist figures and Hindu gods, as well as artifacts, and introduces its world heritage sites and areas of natural beauty. This is the first time that the finest examples of Sri Lankan cultural heritage are being exhibited on a large scale in Japan.

SFT will show a selection of items from Labraba, a store in Kichijoji which specializes in Mexican folk art. Some of the items available will be brightly coloured wooden animal carvings from Oahakan, ceramic figures of The Agular Family, famously collected by Rockefeller and Alexander Girard and beautiful, hand woven, woolen rugs from Zapotec. As all items are handmade they are all a little different and give a small insight into Mexican culture.

Taro Okamoto produced many works with hands as their motif. He repeatedly created images of hands through various media, such as painting, sculpture, furniture and other products. For Okamoto, the hand, along with the eye, was an important tool for sensing the world around him, a window outwards that connected the world with himself. Okamoto trusted the sensations felt through his own hands and treasured them. This exhibition proposes an overview of Okamoto's work through the motifs of hands, feet and eyes. I hope viewers will be able to experience something of Okamoto's sensibility, one that strove to see through to the very essence of the world. (Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum Director Akiomi Hirano)

In addition to its rapid economic growth, China has gained much attention not only for the Beijing Olympics, but also for its contemporary art scene, which has made waves across the world. Since the period of reform and open-door policies dating from the 1970s, China saw new modes of expression emerge that were entirely different from socialist realism. Then, in 1979, the Star Painting Group held an exhibition that set a precedent for a new type of artistic activity whose focus was on the individual characteristics of each artist. Around the mid-1980s, a variety of avant-garde groups formed all over China, leading to the famed "85 Art Movement". Against a backdrop of information flows from Western Europe, these groups of artists took on domestic social themes, expressing them through various media ranging from painting, sculpture, performance and installation. At the beginning of the 1990s, a series of artists gained international attention through the art movements "political pop" and "cynical realism", after which more radical forms of art emerged. Thus, with accompanying globalization movements from 2000 onward, Chinese contemporary art has come to be recognized as a quintessential phenomenon that symbolized the opening up of the nation as well as its booming art market. Showcased at this exhibition are works by both well-established and up-and-coming artists, reflecting 20 years of Chinese contemporary art history in their individual ways. [Image: Fang Lijun "Series 2 No.3" (1992) oil on canvas, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum Collection]

"Annette Messager: The Messengers" is the first major solo exhibition for leading French artist Annette Messager to be held in Japan. Painting, photography, articles, objects assembled from found objects, words, stuffed animals, plush toys, fabrics, embroidery, thread and knitting: these and many other objects from everyday life have found their way into the art of Annette Messager since she began working in the 1970s. Keeping her work based firmly in everyday life, Messager explores the various dichotomies and contradictions inherent in the human condition: religion and secularity, humor and fear, love and pain, woman and man, animal and human, childhood and adulthood, life and death, surface and substance. Springing perhaps from meditations on impulsive collecting or the body, from games with plush toys, or from clever wordplay, Messager's art possesses both a childlike innocence and a brutality that afford multiple readings. With a flair for incorporating wry humor into even the most direct confrontations with negative aspects of human endeavor, Messager is able to move and delight people of all generations. Charming and fantastical, and at times taking strange and mysterious forms, Messager's art works are "messengers" that talk directly to our souls. This exhibition was originally shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and has toured to Finland and Korea. The roughly 30 works on show include Casino, for which the artist won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2005, and other important works such as articulated-disarticulated.

The search for an individual style has unfolded and evolved with great vigor throughout the history of modern and contemporary art. Consider the Impressionist artists such as Claude Monet and Pierre-August Renoir, who looked beyond traditional painting in search of new forms of art, or Paul Cézanne, whose work was a major influence on the birth of Cubism. Explore Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, constant leaders in 20th century art. Then there came the birth and evolution of Abstract art. Rethink Western-style artists in Japan who, while mastering the techniques and themes of Western art, struggled with the challenge of establishing, as Japanese artists, their own voices and styles. This exhibition of 180 paintings and sculptures from the Bridgestone Museum of Art collection offers a delightful stroll, room by room, through these historic developments in the world of art. [Image: Claude Monet "Twilight, Venice" (c. 1908)]