Reviews | TABlog | Tokyo Art Beat

Judging from this year’s Tokyo Art Directors Club awards exhibition, the “driving force in the Japanese advertising and design world” could use a little push.

Time and movement slows down; recorded moments seem stretched and distorted, appearing as apparitions frozen on screen.

A visit to this exhibition feels like a cross between an art-school senior thesis presentation and a walk-through technical manual for the making of Pop Art.

The male gaze and its objectification of women may differ in specifics when it comes to comparing Eastern and Western art forms, but this issue holds a central place in the history of art regardless of the country of origin, style or medium.

“Variety is the spice of life.” Often times, people use this phrase as an excuse for changing jobs or even more commonly their boyfriend/girlfriend. Who can blame them?

Often attempting to artificially create some connection between two artists work based on a vague stylistic similarity can be difficult.

So what is the mysteriously tense allure of a question, as opposed to an answer?

Opposite the Deco spires and brick façade of Shinjuku’s Isetan department store, Marui City is shifting premises, and retooling itself from inside.

Homma has been praised for his ability to capture loneliness, isolation, marginalization in children, homes, familiar neighborhoods; he reveals the dystopia hidden in an otherwise peaceful scenes.

Sitting on an artificially created island, Odaiba is as much a symbol of Japan’s technological achievement as Ginza is the embodiment of luxury.

This look at the super crowded Leonardo Da Vinci exhibition currently taking place at the Tokyo National Museum is the first in a new series of TAB manga exhibition reviews and features on the Tokyo art scene.

Marlene Dumas’ paintings echo through the exhibition space, and one can feel that this Amsterdam-based South African artist is a strong communicator of life, death and the spaces that-exist in between.

Find me one person who couldn’t do with a little more romance. To that effect, the Bunka Gakuen Costume Museum has put together an attractive exhibit on Rococo fashion (think silk brocade, embroidery, and floor-sweeping gowns) and the evolution of the dress in Europe thereafter.

Rising like a colossal red lipstick in the heart of Ginza, the Shiseido Building is a sophisticated and striking sight in a sea of look-at-me structures.

Photographic history remembers Wynn Bullock, though a latecomer, as one of the big three from the ‘West Coast School’ of landscape photographers, after Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.

A few minutes walk from the ever-hectic Harajuku, nestling in a quiet street is a one room exhibition that proves to be a world within a world - its compactness providing a welcome, inspirational break.

Self-exploration and identity politics are major preoccupations for contemporary artists around the globe. The wonderfully eclectic exhibition Show Me Thai confirms that Thai artists are no exception.

Any exhibition that brings together the work of Chinese, Korean and Japanese artists could potentially lapse into lazy and chaotic differentiations or simplistic unisons.

The photographs on display in this exhibition are a valuable documentation of Tokyo’s history, capturing the meaning in moments of a continually changing reality; it is a kaleidoscopic collection of post-war Japan from the 1950s up to the new millennium.

A long corridor filled with women in orangey-red elevator girl outfits lying along the length of a travelator…

Scrap’n Build. This has been the predominant urban planning philosophy that drives the metabolism of Tokyo.

For the love of concrete, they came. To lay hands on it, caress it, feel its cool exposed indifference; to pit their body’s strength against it and inevitably lose. These are the crowds for the opening of 21_21 Design Sight in Roppongi’s Tokyo Midtown complex.

I found myself coming up with a new proverb: the ghosts of sad cheap souls live on in sad, cheap furniture.

Whether it’s a folding screen you’re after, kimono, ukiyoe prints, ceramics, photography, installation or even a Steinway piano, chances are that Art Fair Tokyo 2007 has it.

In Tokyo, nothing is where it really ought to be.

Puzzles can be engaging and maddening, but for satisfaction they require a payoff. An exhibition at the Taka Ishii Gallery of work by British artist Cerith Wyn Evans illustrates this fact both in the location of the gallery and the work contained therein.

The defining point in the Tatsumi Shimura centenary show surfaces as history contravenes, leaving this popular artist to fall between the cracks. What factors condemn Shimura, an able and industrious illustrator, to the third tier?

What makes a good business introduction? Should it follow a pattern of prescribed behaviour in which both parties gradually come to understand how they might exploit one another?

This afternoon at 2pm, Jingubashi bridge in Harajuku — the typical gathering point between snap-happy, camera-wielding tourists and the harajuku kids wearing their outrageous outfits and make up — saw a collaborative performance between and artist and two musicians.

In my romantic, introspective reality, each and every moment is made up of a thousand thoughts; induced by senses firing synapses they recall memories that themselves, in turn, fill up the moment.