Reviews | TABlog | Tokyo Art Beat

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.

Black baby dolls are venturing out into the Australian outback to reclaim the land that was taken from them by white colonists 200 years ago.

Perhaps it was the acrid smell of busted electronics covering the walls, but some thing about Scott de Vacherie’s exhibition Art Front Gallery immediately had me feeling disturbed.

The Diesel Denim Gallery in Daikanyama is hosting a collection of illustrations and graphic art inspired by the theme ‘Japan’.

The highlight of the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemprain exhibition is undoubtedly Ron Mueck’s “In Bed” (2005), also shown in the poster.

I was having dinner in Shibuya. In a cafe, mostly women around, floating laces and floral cloths, spring plucked on string, the waitress, like a friend, was joking with me and I was replying with my broken Frenglish remixed with meager 日本語.

A friend and I ended a recent weekend tour of Tokyo’s galleries at Roppongi’s Complex building, and though much of the work there was compelling, it was Daisuke Ohba’s exhibition “Labyrinth” at the newest of the building’s spaces -Magical Artroom- that seemed to be the focus of our coffee shop recap afterward.

I attended Naoki Honjyo’s “Small Planet” exhibition in Daikanyama’s Good Design Gallery with a friend, after giving up on a planned field trip to Yokohama that day (he overslept big time, and we figured it wasn’t worth going all the way up there so late in the afternoon).

The “Mirrorball” Music Video Festival is being held this weekend (April 15th and 16th) at Ropppongi’s Super Deluxe. I was able to catch the “Best of the Best” session on Saturday.

At the beginning of spring, “Tokyo Blossoms” is blooming in Shinagawa. It is the title of the new exhibition held at Hara Museum of Contemporary Art.

When the Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami launched the first ever Geisai art market in Tokyo, he hailed it as ‘a revolutionary art event in the 21st century that will pave the way for a friendlier, interactive art world’.

“A-Lunch” started in the last year 2005, as an initiative by artist Tomoko Konoike to offer an alternative relationship between artists and the audience.

Drawing Restraint 9, which is currently being screened at Cinema Rise in Shibuya, marks the 9th installment of Matthew Barney’s ongoing Drawing Restraint series.

Photographer James Welling is showing 8 new pieces at Wako Works of Art in Shinjuku.

Japanese illustrator/artist Nobumasa Takahashi is a friendly guy. As we walk into the gallery space of his month-long exhibition “Japanese Graffiti” held in the café/bar area of Space Force in Nakameguro, the petit, ponytailed Takahashi beams at us from the top of a stepladder, black marker in hand.

In a sketchbook in 1856, the French painter Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot wrote, “Whatever the site or the object, let’s submit ourselves to the first impression.

This show, organized within a series of exhibitions curated by Command-N, an activity-based art collective directed by artist Masato Nakamura, highlights the newest activities of artist Hideki Nakazawa, focused on the actual patents he has obtained during the past recent years.

As I was exiting the first room of the Hiroshi Sugimoto show, End of Time at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, I became aware of a slight tension in my head, the kind I remember from the sixth grade when working on a lengthy, puzzling but pleasant math homework.