News Digest March 30 to April 3 | TABlog | Tokyo Art Beat

All’s fair in love and art
The big events this week were the openings of 101Tokyo and Art Fair Tokyo. There lots of crowds, lots of booths and lots of oddities. At the former, a special edition of Pecha Kucha Night was held on April 2. Both events run until April 5. Of course, Tokyo’s unofficial Art Week wasn’t just about the two big art fairs; there were also major auctions happening at Shinwa and Est-Ouest.


London Calling
Japanese art is still prominent overseas, both the new and the old. A major exhibition of Kuniyoshi Utagawa’s prints has opened at the Royal Academy, London. See this review from the Guardian. Chino Otsuka’s photographs are also on show at the Daiwa Foundation.

As much anticipated, the architectural duo Sanaa (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) have unveiled their design for the Serpertine Gallery’s summer pavilion, opening this July in London. The pair have described it as “floating aluminium drifting freely between the trees like smoke.” 2002’s pavilion was also by a Japanese architect (Toyo Ito) and was highly acclaimed. See the Serpertine Gallery’s website and the Guardian for more.

They said it couldn’t get any worse…
More bad news among arts-related media. After the closures of Ping Mag and Tokyo Art Cross comes the news that now magazine Art iT will be ceasing publication. The next issue on June 5 will be the last. The closure is being branded as a renewal, in that content will be available online, and will continue to be bilingual (and in fact will even expand to have Chinese articles). Howeve, REALTOKYO, editor Tetsuya Ozaki’s other project, have announced on their REALTOKYO website that they will be scaling back significantly, particularly on English language articles, no doubt to concentrate on the Art iT site.

Anime lovers will perhaps have already heard about the American magazine Anime Insider’s decision to cease operations after eight years. See this news report.

Other events
Gelmannica, an international electronic music and media arts event, is happening on Friday April 10. See the event website for more.

Nihonbashi gallery Cashi is to open a new space in a MUJI refridgerator in its backyard, where they will exhibit selected young artists’ work for one year. Watch TAB for further details of any events.

Keith Ng has published his photography book “For Obama”, chronicling the trip he made to the Fukui prefecture town that shares its name with the current American President. It will be available for a limited edition of two hundred copies. See the artist’s website for further information.

Announcements
Data detailing the list of 2008’s most-visited museums in the world has been released. Although Japanese exhibitions often feature in the top five for number of visitors, the museums themselves don’t really compare with giants like the Louvre (eight and a half million) or the British Museum (just under six million), which topped the list. See the New York Times here for more.

The Corel Digital Art Competition 2009 is now accepting submissions from the Asia-Pacific region. The prize money totals over a million yen and the closing date for submission is May 31. The categories for entries include photography, video and graphics. See the Competition homepage.

The Eiga Taisho have been announced, selected by staff from independent cinemas nationwide. The winner was not actually Okuribito, though it did bring home an Oscar. The Dark Knight came out on top, followed by Gururi no koto.

Exit stage left pursued by bear
And finally, Yayoi Kusuma apparently made a brief appearance at a filming showing in Sydney. A very brief appearance. And it may not even have been her. See this blog posting (and its comments) for more: