Reviews | TABlog | Tokyo Art Beat

Documenta is an important and deliberately infrequent contemporary art exhibition, which takes place every five years in a small city of Kassel in Germany.

On my first visit to GEISAI, I was expecting a hall so vast and full of art that it would be too overwhelming to take anything in.

Yesterday, I was the first of six people to take part in the “DIVVY/dual” exhibition taking place this week in Space Kobo and Tomo in Ginza.

Is it because I went to a public university in the liberal New York that I take free scholarly talks for granted? Perhaps.

Staring into the work of Soichi Yamaguchi at Roppongi’s Magical Art Room, images seem to melt away and we are caught up in the children’s candy presence of the surface.

It looks like Roppongi’s Super Deluxe is going to be welcoming another event series, alongside the club’s staples as Pecha Kucha Night.

Bank Art Studios’ building in Yokohama seems too large for the few artists that have their art space and residency there, at least in Tokyo standards.

I first learned about the Jakuchu Tokyo National Museum exhibit from a Tokyo metro train ad for a popular magazine.

Janaina Tschäpe’s exhibit at Tokyo Wonder Site feels like a trip to the Rain Forest or a scuba diving expedition.

ASK? Kimura Space is slowly becoming my favorite Tokyo gallery. I was just there for a brilliant Kei Oyama animation, and the gallery is already in the middle of another short film show, grandly called ASK? Film Festival.

Ernesto Neto has just had an opening… wait… two openings in Tokyo. They took place on the same evening at the Tomio Koyama Gallery and Koyanagi Gallery.

Photographer Daido Moriyama, a Tokyo legend, is currently showing at the Taka Ishii Gallery: a video that has been sitting on the shelves for over 30 years.

“The Listening” is the title of the Tokyo- San Francisco Art Festival, now in Tokyo.

Anyone, who has ever unwrapped a piece of pastry from a combini store and thrown away the content, but played with the fascinating wrapping, will imagine what a joy it is to go a perfume vessel show.

Sometimes there are exhibitions that you know you want to see from the moment you come across the poster: it only takes one image to tell you that the rest of the exhibition will be great.

Gallery “ASK? Art Space Kimura” is another must see, with its current exhibition closing this weekend. Kei Oyama’s animations entitled “An Ordinary Sunday” present life in three uniform looking rooms inhabited by uniform looking “people”.

There is not much time left to see the Zhang Xiaogang exhibit at Tokyo Wonder Site in Shibuya. However, the artist is worth keeping in mind. He’s been called the major artist of the Sichuan school as well as a symbolist- surrealist.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography is holding three photography shows this early Summer. I visited the museum the other day and looked at them all.

Having been trained in classical music and aesthetics, how did Nam June Paik come to be referred to as “the father of video art”?

Keisuke Shirota, now at Base Gallery for the second time since his 2003 university graduation, turns snapshots into fine art.

Installation art does not have a commercial appeal because, among other reasons, it does not usually take on a permanent or practical enough form for private collectors to display.

In Stanislaw LEM’s Solaris a crew of scientists is brought to a planet that is covered in flowing organic matter.

There is no doubt that artist Minako Abe’s paintings of broad mountain-scapes and soft rolling fields were a welcome sight to tired Tokyo eyes. But it is her colors that ultimately reach out to absorb us.

“Africa Remix” was held at the Hayward Gallery in London at the beginning of last year, as part of “Africa 05″, a season of cultural events taking place across the country.

“Africa Remix” has come to Tokyo, which was in London at Hayward Gallery one year ago. Coupled with many musical events all around the town, last year in London was so much about Africa.

We arrived at Watari-um to see the “Beautiful Cities in Dreams” exhibition just as it started pouring – sudden showers after uncharacteristically hot, sunny weather for a May afternoon.

Tadaomi Shibuya’s paintings are strikingly vivid, and unapologetically pop.

Hidehiro Watanabe’s work is a meditation on the effects of globalization through otherwordly depictions of international travel.

If it were the middle of summer right now – 35 degrees and rising outside – then I would definitely recommend going to Hitoshi Nishiyama’s “White Out” installation to cool down.

Move on Asia 2006 is a traveling festival of animation and video art by 21 young artists from six Asian countries.