Heat exhaustion might be enough to lure you to this show. The promise of clear Northern landscapes, dark interior views, and pale, un-sweaty people sounds like heaven in the midst of Tokyo’s cruelest month, and heaven it is to plunge into the air conditioning through the faux-marble archway marking the entry to NACT’s special exhibition room.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/stilllife1.jpg" alt="Peter Paul Rubens, 'Cimon and Iphigenia' (c.1617) Oil on canvas, 208 x 282cm" title="© Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie, Vienna" width="518" height="378" class="imgcaption" />
All of these paintings are on loan from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the gallery has been transformed into something that loosely evokes European halls of culture: deep paint colors on the walls, large flower arrangements, and waltzes playing in the gift shop. Still you won’t find much English here, aside from the plaques identifying each painting, so those interested should borrow the audio guide.
The show is loosely organized around different strains of still-life painting, a primarily Dutch pursuit although painters of other nationalities are represented. The focus is partly on the historical development of the genre, but the curators also emphasize the importance of allegory and visual shorthand: a rose is not just a rose but also a symbol of romance, youth, and beauty.
A skull is also not just a skull: the exhibition’s first grouping includes a series of vanitas paintings, variations on the theme of mortality and life’s fleeting pleasures. While the Japanese celebrate a similar concept by getting drunk under the cherry trees, these dour Northerners get at the idea a bit more literally with skulls, hourglasses and other reminders of the grave. By far the best executed of these works is Peter Gerritsz van Roestraten’s ‘Vanitas Painting’, in which shelled walnuts stand in for the human brain while other objects—a metal chalice, a violin—glimmer in the murky background.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/stilllife2.jpg" alt="Antonio de Pereda y Salgado, 'Allegory of Vanity' (c.1634) Oil on canvas, 139.5 x 174cm" title="© Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie, Vienna" width="518" height="399" class="imgcaption" />
The Allegory of Vanity by Antonio de Pereda y Salgado belongs to the same group, but here the subject has more to do with the pride of empires than that of individual man. In Salgado’s large canvas a winged goddess sits surrounded by the spoils of colonization: a globe, a clock, precious pearls and coins. But nearby are the tools on which that tribute depends – a rifle and a suit of armor – and the inevitable skull serves as a reminder that even national pride but shortly precedes a fall.
But wait, you say, we were promised pretty pictures of flowers and fruit! That is, after all, what still life is known for. Don’t despair; the archetypal images are here as well. The loveliest are probably Jan Anton van der Baren’s ‘Vase of Roses’ and the better-known Jan van den Hecke’s ‘Vase of Flowers’. Hecke’s painting includes several of the exotic tulips that inspired such a frenzy of excess in mid-seventeenth-century Holland, when bulbs went for many times more than an average yearly salary. Once again the curators remind us that in art, a flower is never just a flower: the tulip is a symbol of luxury, an indicator of larger economic trends, and a product of international trade that had been only recently introduced from the Ottoman empire.
Similarly, in the many images of game birds and animals after the hunt, the emphasis is on aristocracy and its pursuits rather than on the hunt itself. But it makes little difference to the animals, and the painters take advantage of the opportunity to do some incredible nature studies. A jaw-droppingly gorgeous example is Jan Weenix’s ‘Dead Hare’ of 1690, in which the textures are so lusciously rendered that the viewer almost doesn’t notice the macabre subject matter: a dead rabbit, strung up to drain, flanked by dead pheasants. In the distance, misty ruins recede into the forest. The peacefulness and beauty of the scene is almost enough to make anyone take up hunting.
The blockbuster artists of the show are reserved for the last section, “Genre Scenes, Portraiture and the Still Life,” which attempts to show how small still life scenes are inserted into larger paintings as “attributes” illustrating the character or social standing of the people depicted.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/stilllife3.jpg" alt="Jan Steen, 'Beware of Luxury' (1663) Oil on canvas, 105 x 145cm" title="© Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie, Vienna" width="518" height="371" class="imgcaption" />
This is where you can find Jan Brueghel the Elder’s ‘Visit to the Farm’, a typically crisp Brueghel scene in shades of brown with pops of bright blue and red. Just steps away is Rubens’ ‘Cimon and Iphigenia’, a fantastically fleshy pile of nudes dozing in the heat of an early summer’s day. Jan Steen, that standard of every art-history textbook, is represented here by two paintings: ‘Beware of Luxury’, a preachy work showing the dangers of too much to drink and too little to do, and the similarly themed ‘Peasant Wedding (The Deceived Bridegroom)’. 
But the superstar of the show is Velázquez’s ‘Infanta Margarita Teresa in a Pink Dress’. Like his famous ‘Las Meninas’, the subject is a child of the Spanish royal family. Here she is depicted alone except for a vase of flowers including a few marguerites — a play on the little girl’s name, while the roses in the bouquet echo her flushed chubby cheeks and the pattern on her pink dress. 
Enjoy this piece and the opportunity to see Velázquez’s brushwork up close. But reserve some time to stroll across the room and peek at the show’s sleeper hit, Tiberio Tinelli’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’. A stunningly vertical painting, it shows a woman in dress so elaborate that it could almost constitute a still life in itself. The painter has put an incredible amount of observation and experimentation into getting the overlay of lace, tulle, and ribbon exactly right. Still-life is often thought of as conservative and traditional, but like all art forms, it was once new. This exhibition –- full of tour de force paintings — reminds us of the continual inventiveness of the artist

Life is Sweet

When is a seam more than a seam? When it’s inside-out or asymmetrical: these are the signature moves of deconstructionist designers, who make clothes so beautiful that even their insides shine.
The origin of this moment in fashion can be traced back to one city: Antwerp, a regional capital in Belgium, home to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts that churned out six young designers destined to burst onto the international scene in the 1980s. Ann Demeulemeester, Walter van Beirendonck, Dries Van Noten, Marina Yee and two Dirks (Van Saene and Bikkembergs) share more than vowel-heavy names; they are all interested in that essence of deconstruction, the idea of “showing process”, or in other words, showing how their clothing designs are actually made. 
Often this involves the aforementioned seams; asymmetrical hems are also a favored trope; but the best of these designers have an ability to apply wit to the sometimes overly serious world of fashion. Marina Yee seems to get it just right, altering familiar clothing forms (coat, dress) into marvelous brightly colored hybrids.
But sometimes the process goes less well. The exhibition includes the work of a number of younger Antwerp designers, and let’s just admit it: some of their stuff is truly awful. Bernhard Willhelm’s black evening dress with Michael Jackson’s sequined face especially sticks in the memory, as do Bruno Pieters’s works of incredible frumpery and stiffness. 
But Raf Simons’s luxurious black ensembles with frayed edges play on the elegant side of edgy. Veronique Branquinho’s autumnal plaids, along with A.F. Vandevorst’s caramel leather breastplates, would look great on any society matron. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/schoolsout1.jpg" alt="Bernhard Willhelm, 'Autumn-Winter' (1999-2000) (left), (2000-2001) (right), (2001-2002) (center)" title="Image courtesy of Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery" width="257" height="343" class="imgcaption floatl" /><img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/schoolsout3.jpg" alt="Marina Yee (2006)" title="Image courtesy of Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery" width="257" height="343" class="imgcaption floatl" /> 
The most fun are the school projects from recent graduates of the RFA’s four-year fashion program. Since the ‘80s the students have become more and more international but their pieces still share a youthful exuberance. There’s Alexandra Verschueren’s suit made of window blinds; Lion Blau’s wicker form; and Emilie Pierlot’s surprisingly covetable ensemble of hot pink felt and faux fur. (You might actually get away with wearing this in Tokyo, though perhaps not Antwerp.) Many of the students display a high degree of skill in garment tailoring and construction, as well as a respect for and appropriate use of materials. What better tribute to the school is there than that?

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School’s Out

As you walk into the current show at Hermes, you may be confused. There is no hint of the visual here, nothing in particular to look at; instead, you are overwhelmed by sound.
Forty speakers are arrayed within the stripped-down space, each playing the recorded voice of one person singing his or her part in a sixteenth-century religious score; the effect is of an invisible choir. All you see is speakers, but what you hear is the richness of many human voices.
This effect is the work of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, a pair of Canadian artists who live and work together. (Miller had minimal involvement with this particular sound installation, but did work closely with Cardiff on the other piece in the show.) Their work ranges from the personal (2004’s ‘Road Trip’ displays slide images taken by Miller’s grandfather during a cross-country trip shortly before his death) to the public (Cardiff’s recorded ‘Walks’ lead participants on audio and video tours of cities including New York, Montreal and Berlin). All of their installations incorporate some elements of sound and video recording, but always they use this high-tech equipment to create a low-tech experience of immersion: the same breakdown of disbelief that makes a novel or a play work. And always the artists eventually jolt the viewer out of that immersion experience with some reminder that this is art, not the real world. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/alleluiah1.jpg" alt="Janet Cardiff, 'The Forty-Part Mortet' (2001)
Mixed Media Installation with Sound" title="© Nacása&Partners Inc. Courtesy of Hermès Japon" width="518" height="345" class="imgcaption" /> 
In ‘The Forty-Part Motet’ at Hermès, the wake-up call takes the form of an intermission. One moment you’re listening to this incredible music surging all around you, perhaps releasing yourself into a state of bliss; then, suddenly, the singing stops. But the recording doesn’t – you slowly become aware that the speakers are continuing to emit the sounds of choristers on break: yawns, low conversations, a bit of humming and coughing. After three minutes, the music starts again.
The recording is the Salisbury Cathedral Choir singing ‘Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui,’ a motet written by the British court composer Thomas Tallis in the 1570s. While the subject of the text is fairly standard (a hymn of praise based on the Book of Judith), its form is innovative: it was written for eight choirs of five people each (soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, and bass) and it was intended to be sung in the round. At the aristocratic residence where it was first performed, musicologists believe, the eight choirs split into balconies surrounding a large room and sang facing the audience in the center. The score was written to maximize the dramatic effect of the space, as the sound begins by “rotating” from one choir to the next until they eventually join together.
What Cardiff has done here is to reproduce that early experience of the piece for us latter-day non-aristocrats: we can sit in the center and feel totally surrounded by the music, or stroll around the room and try to identify with the various singers.
A version of this work is on permanent view in a reconstructed school chapel at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, but it has been installed in all kinds of places: religious, cultural, large and small. This is probably one of the tinier spaces for this installation, but it works. The extreme regularity of Piano’s architecture matches well with the identical speakers to contrast with the individuality of the singer’s voices. The gallery’s pale palette, accentuated by the watery Tokyo light that comes through the glass block of the walls, just seems to give way before the full feeling of the music. Even this box of a room is made to feel like a cathedral. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/alleluia2.jpg" alt="Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, 'Night Canoeing' (2004)
Mixed Media Installation (17 min. loop, colour, sound)" title="© Nacása&Partners Inc. Courtesy of Hermès Japon" width="518" height="312" class="imgcaption" /> 
Janet Cardiff has said of the installation, “I placed the speakers around the room in an oval so that the listener would be able to really feel the sculptural construction of the piece by Tallis. You can hear the sound move from one choir to another, jumping back and forth, echoing each other and then experience the overwhelming feeling as the sound waves hit you when all of the singers are singing.”
A similar feeling of immersion – this time in silence – is also created by the show’s other work, ‘Night Canoeing.’ Cardiff and Miller collaborated on this 17-minute video and audio loop, which plays in a black box. The creaking of the boat, the splashing of the oars, and the mist rising off water and lily pads all create a tremendously peaceful feeling that lasts until you step back out into the street.

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Alleluia

Jim Lambie has made a career out of dorm rooms. Specifically, your cool older brother’s room circa 1978. Psychedelic patterns in wild colors, piles of old album covers, and posters of music idols all feature prominently in Lambie’s oeuvre, though lava lamps are conspicuous by their absence. This guy hit adolescence in the heyday of punk and disco, and recovery seems to be taking him a while.
“Unknown Pleasures” exhibits a series of works that Lambie and his team of assistants installed at the Hara Museum in December last year. The show includes several of the Scottish artist’s trademarks: a vibrantly colored sculpture made of deconstructed chairs and mirrored handbags (‘Train in Vain’), a series of black-and-white posters of pop-culture idols overlaid with fragments of floral oil paintings (‘Found Flower Paintings’), multi-knobbed doors leading nowhere (‘Maybelline,’ ‘Plastic Ono,’ and ‘Kinda Blue’). 
<img class="imgcaption" title="© Jim Lambie and Hara Museum of Contemporary Art" src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/vintage-vinyl1.jpg" alt="Jim Lambie, 'Train in Vain' (2008) Wooden chairs, handbags, mirrors, gloss paint, dimensions variable" width="518" height="345" /> 
And herein lies the rub. I admire some of Lambie’s work, I really do. He is a master at creating disorienting environments. But how often can an artist—especially one working in the genre of site-specific conceptual art—productively repeat a trademark move?
Lambie is perhaps best known for his patterned floor surfaces, which he makes using vinyl tape. In most cases, the tape echoes the outlines of the space, inviting the viewer to think about the interactions between art and architecture, two-dimensional and three-dimensional work, decoration and design.
For this show, however, he has used the tape to create fan-shaped arcs in simple black and white (the work as a whole is called ‘The Strokes’). At first, this seemed appropriate: the Hara, after all, is housed in a High Modernist structure, a former residence designed by Jin Watanabe. Monochromatic arcs would surely meet with Bauhaus approval. But a little research reveals that Lambie has used this pattern before: in a show at Boston’s Museum of Fine Art last year, the same pattern appeared as a backdrop for the same colorful chairs that now make up ‘Train in Vain.’ How site-specific is that? (See a previous review of Lambie’s trademark stripes <a href="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/2007/10/tripolar-disorder.html">here</a> on TABlog.)
<img class="imgcaption floatl" title="© Jim Lambie and Hara Museum of Contemporary Art" src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/vintage-vinyl3.jpg" alt="Jim Lambie, 'Sonic Reducer' (12 pieces) (2008) Concrete, album covers, 35.5 x 35.5 x 35.5 cm (each)" width="257" height="386" /><img class="imgcaption floatl" title="© Jim Lambie and Hara Museum of Contemporary Art" src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/vintage-vinyl2.jpg" alt="Jim Lambie, 'I Didn't Know I Loved You Til' I Saw You Rock 'N' Roll' (2008) Mattress, gloss paint, 140 x 190 x 20 cm" width="257" height="386" /> 
Frankly, I felt cheated by this exhibition. Over and over again, I would find myself excited about particular works, only to discover that they were not as original as they seemed. ‘I Didn’t Know I Loved You Til’ I Saw You Rock ‘N’ Roll’ – which is, to my mind, the strongest piece here – is a good example. The work consists of a mattress mounted onto the wall above the stairs. It is coated in high-gloss paint of a lurid maroon color that inevitably evokes blood as it drips down the wall and pools on the stair treads. Lambie has said that he chose to mount the piece here, where the viewer is nearing the house’s former bedrooms, because the mattress is a symbol of domesticity. Pretty cool, right? Well, yeah, until you realize Lambie has made other mattresses in other colors for other shows in institutional, not domestic, settings.
Maybe I’m asking too much. Lambie is a musician and DJ as well as a visual artist, and he often draws parallels between the two worlds. Perhaps it is useful for us viewers, too, to think of him as a rock star, as David Bowie instead of Rembrandt. Musicians must often perform the same material night after night, in venue after venue, and though you always want to believe that they’re playing your favorite song just for you, you’re wrong. I guess the international art market is getting to be the same way.
(Readers interested in seeing footage of the installation process and interviews with the artist should visit the Museum’s website <a href="http://www.haramuseum.or.jp/en/common/doorToArt/index.html">here</a>.)

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Vintage Vinyl

The most idealistic projects on view at the Good Design Awards exhibition are also the least attractive. The atmosphere of the competition is unabashedly optimistic, particularly in the “Mobility” category. There, designers attempt to imagine a cleaner, greener, and more convenient future, with ingenious but not always beautiful results. The Dual Mode Vehicle (DMV) from the Hokkaido Railway Company is big, yellow, and clunky, for example, but its looks are more than offset by its functionality: it can operate on both roads and railway tracks, switching between the two modes in only fifteen seconds. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/gooddesignexhibition2008_2.jpg" alt="Drill Design, 'trash pots'" width="257" height="342" class="imgcaption floatl" />
Also promising is the Wireless Earthquake Detector and Outlet Control System from Tokyo Denki, a gadget that automatically disconnects hazards like irons in the event of an earthquake. Given the massive fire damage caused by hot lunchtime ovens at the time of the 1923 quake, this could be a lifesaving innovation.
Prettier but much less important are the paper “trash pots” proposed by Drill Design in three neutral colors: there’s just something daring about a waste receptacle that’s made of the same material as the waste itself. But the company claims this trashcan is hardy and long lasting, and when its life cycle eventually ends it can be responsibly recycled. 
And in the “gotta have it” category: CD protectors in candy colors from Kanou Seiko Corp. and even brighter-colored USB memory sticks from Rightning Inc., whose soft rubber tails can tie onto a belt loop or backpack strap for easy transport.
Takenaka’s Gyre building, designed by the Dutch firm MVRDV, makes it into the room, represented by a swanky lit-Plexiglas model. Mori Shoji Company offers a ruffly towel that would be a hit in Harajuku. Shin + Tomoko Azumi are showing a modular seating system whose laminate seat is bent three-dimensionally into sinuous curves: lovely as a bench, but unfortunately lumpy and awkward when stacked. Keep working on that one, guys, and better luck next year.

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Products for a Perfect World

This year’s graduation show at Tokyo’s famed University of the Arts (Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku, popularly known as Geidai) is hands down the best student art show I have ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot. If you are at all interested in art — especially the more ‘traditional’ forms like painting and sculpture — you absolutely must figure out how to get there this week, during business hours, before the show closes. Yes, it is even worth taking the afternoon off work. 
If you only have an hour or two, head straight for the university museum, which is showing student work on all of its floors. Skip the new-media installations and the area devoted to paintings in the Japanese tradition; save your time for the all-star work on levels 3 and B2. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/graduation-day1.jpg" alt="Photo: Jessica Niles DeHoff" title="" width="518" height="389" class="imgcaption" /> 
What strikes me most about this show is the staggering variety of styles and methodologies on display. Most university art programs are handicapped by a strong ideological bent: abstract painting is in while realism is out, or sculpture in stone is hopelessly passé. But here, apparently, students are free to pursue whatever their interests might be, and they do so in an incredibly polished and professional manner, with impeccable results that are in most cases both conceptually interesting and aesthetically complete. On the third floor, one artist has warped musical scores into architectural drawings; another sculpted wood into an entwined goddess and dragon that would be at home in an ancient temple of some indeterminate culture; somebody else had the bizarre and fascinating idea of piecing trash together into a word-sculpture that reads “B Nice 2 Nature” when viewed from the front, but resolves itself into either a fish or a bird when viewed from either side. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/graduation-day2.jpg" alt="Photo: Jessica Niles DeHoff" title="" width="518" height="389" class="imgcaption" /> 
A major weakness of contemporary Japanese art is the relentless interest in all things kawaii (cute). Takashi Murakami is perhaps Japan’s best-known art export, and he is as guilty of this stylistic pitfall — which he blames on Japan’s postwar emasculation — as anyone. (And Tokyo’s annual Design Festa also unfortunately tends toward the cute.) But at the Geidai show, there’s nary an anime character nor a doll-faced virgin sexpot to be seen. Only one or two pieces could be said to be influenced by kawaii culture — for example, the incredibly detailed narrative painting in which cartoony animals and spirits act out the Kojiki, one of Japan’s seminal texts — but here the cute is used in service to a larger idea instead of as an end in itself. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/graduation-day4.jpg" alt="Photo: Jessica Niles DeHoff" title="" width="518" height="389" class="imgcaption" /> 
The B2 level houses the final projects of students in craft and design (as opposed to the ‘fine arts’ of the third floor). This is all three-dimensional work, and whether it is done in melted coins, clay, or inlaid lacquer, it’s all executed at a high level of craftsmanship. Students have used both traditional and new techniques to make a variety of stand-alone pieces as well as installation-style environments.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/graduation-day3.jpg" alt="Arata Takano, 'From Darkness into Light'" title="Photo: Jessica Niles DeHoff" width="257" height="343" class="imgcaption floatl" />Especially notable in this latter category is Arata Takano’s ‘From Darkness into Light’, which draws on the ancient mythologies of Japan, China, and the Americas to create an otherworldly tableau. A dark totem pole creates an evil presence in a back corner of the exhibition space, threatening the human figure in the foreground, whose clothing is embroidered with Ainu motifs. Above, a film of a flying raven is projected onto a white disk to evoke the story of the raven that dragged the sun out from behind the moon at the cost of singeing his once-colorful feathers black. Glittery tears cascade from above, creating a curtain that sets off the space of the artwork.
On your way out of the museum building, stop by the eight-story building housing the oil-painting studios, which is open to the public all week. Go to enjoy the smell of turpentine and the feel of a dirty, functioning art space as much as the artwork, which is displayed in each student’s studio space so that you can be surrounded by one person’s artwork at a time. 
For all of these students, despite the economic downturn, the future looks bright. Most of this work would be highly marketable if only it were for sale, but I guess we’ll have to wait until these ingenues find their way into the ‘corporate jobs’ of the art world: partnership with individual galleries.

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Graduation Day

Diener & Diener is a family firm named for its current head, Roger Diener, and his father Marcus, who founded the office in the 1940s. Yet while many family practices remain small, focusing on designing houses for wealthy private clients, these architects have a deep commitment to the public realm that shows in their work.
Typically, designers choose to represent their projects as perfect, isolated, and without urban context, but Diener & Diener favors the opposite approach. In fact, on walking into the exhibition hall you may be confused about what exactly is being exhibited. The darkened first room is filled with rows of solid-wood models contrasted with the color-saturated large-format photographs lining the walls — photographs gorgeous enough to merit their own show. Each of Diener & Diener’s projects is shown in its context, surrounded by traffic lights, streets, and sidewalks as well as by other buildings in various states of decay. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/dienerdiener-2.jpg" alt="'The House and the City: Architecture by Diener & Diener'
View of the exhibition" title="Courtesy: Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery" width="518" height="389" class="imgcaption" /> 
But of course, the pictures aren’t the point; the buildings are. Architecture exhibitions are always a bit difficult as what’s on display is not the finished product itself, but rather a representation of it. The chosen mode of representation can reveal a lot about a firm’s ethos. In this show, the models and the photographs share a certain humbleness, a refusal to privilege the firm’s work above that of other builders and designers.
The house and the city: the exhibition vacillates between these two poles of private and public, individual buildings and the larger practice of making places, neighborhoods, towns. Any good architect is required to work at multiple levels of detail simultaneously, from the scale of the structure and how it will fit into its environment to the scale of the human hand and how it will feel on a particular door or window pull.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/diener-diener1.jpg" alt="Forum 3 / Novartis Pharma, Basel (2005)" title="Photo: Christian Richters" width="257" height="343" class="imgcaption floatl" />This firm is not terribly high profile outside of Europe, but their list of projects is extensive. A university campus in Malmö, Sweden, shows Diener & Diener’s level of comfort with complexity and ambiguity: the caption describes the college as being made of “highly varied parts [in which the] varied densities of different types of buildings will create a multiplicity of interrelating spaces.” Just from glancing at the models, it’s difficult to understand at first which parts are new or proposed, but a closer look reveals that certain buildings, even at this tiny scale, are rendered with more detail; these are Diener’s projects. Viewers who want more information can refer to the complete drawing sets available in the next room, along with videos of interview footage spliced with still photographs. (A warning: the firm is Swiss-German, so most of the exhibition materials are in Japanese and German only.)
In many projects, the architects show a special sensitivity to the ways in which materials can support design choices. A building in Berlin gets a cladding of channel glass echoing the nearby river; a bright-red box of a museum is flooded with light through a glass-finned clerestory; a gray, blank facade distinguishes the addition to a highly decorated historic structure; a high-ceilinged library can be reconfigured by drawing a set of jewel-colored curtains. Clearly this office is not tied to a signature style (as compared to, say, Richard Meier’s white boxes or Zaha Hadid’s swooping forms) but instead seeks to find the best solution to each design problem as it arises. In one of the exhibition’s rooms, the designers’ logical approach is demonstrated by a series of material tests that were undertaken to find the appropriate brick for a project; it’s an unglamorous process that is familiar to architects but rarely revealed to the public.
The gallery’s promotional leaflet asks, “Is the view from my window part of my room? Will our memories be part of our city?” The answer, according to this firm, is a resounding yes.

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Keeping It In the Family

Each year GA Gallery showcases the architectural projects that they have published over the past twelve months, and the link to the printed page is key to understanding this exhibition. Viewers may feel that they’re looking at pages torn straight out of a design magazine, blown up and hung on the gallery wall, though in fact each firm represented here provided its own presentation boards.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/gainternational2008_1.jpg" alt="Installation view of ''GA International 2008'' at Gallery GA" title="© GA photographers" width="518" height="357" class="imgcaption" />
As a result, the show is a little uneven: OMA’s materials are text-heavy and aggressively hip, while those put together by the smaller, less sophisticated firms rely more on pretty pictures. Only the Japanese architects have provided architectural models, presumably because it’s easier to ship domestically than internationally, but the lack of three-dimensional work seriously hurts the exhibition. Why go to a gallery to see these projects, after all, if you can see it all in print? 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/gainternational2008_2.jpg" alt="Installation view of ''GA International 2008'' at Gallery GA" title="© GA photographers" width="518" height="331" class="imgcaption" />
One answer to that, of course, is that these buildings cannot actually be found in print — at least, not in the mainstream architectural press. Jean Nouvel’s slick <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/15/arts/design/15arch.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin">residential tower</a> in New York City, for example, will start construction next year but to date it has received surprisingly little attention. A few of the other firms are so small or so obscurely located that you might never hear of them at all: one of the most beautiful projects on view, a shimmering mirage of a <a href="http://bustler.net/index.php/article/snhetta_wins_king_abdulaziz_center_for_knowledge_and_culture_competition_in/">cultural center</a> in Saudi Arabia, was designed by a firm called Snøhetta that is little known outside its native Norway.
As for local talent, Kengo Kuma is represented here, as is Toyo Ito, whose design for a media center at University of California Berkeley is lusciously curvy. Visitors can also see Riken Yamamoto’s plans for a housing block in Korea and Arata Isozaki’s municipal office building for Hanoi — a cubic form echoed by a square reflecting pool.
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/gainternational2008_3.jpg" alt="Installation view of ''GA International 2008'' at Gallery GA" title="© GA photographers" width="518" height="345" class="imgcaption" />
No show of international architecture would be complete without a few starchitects thrown into the mix, and so here we find Zaha Hadid’s <a href="http://archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/071218hadid.asp">project</a> for the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. More interesting is Peter Eisenman’s <a href="http://www.mtarch.com/mtazayedpress060612.html">competition entry</a> for the Sheikh Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi, a typically complex mesh of sunscreens, frames and enclosures. Eisenman likens the overall effect to an arabesque, evocative of the shifting patterns of the desert, but whatever the rationale, the interaction of the design’s many layers does yield a fascinating cross-section.
For serious fans of architecture, this show is a worthwhile opportunity to see GA’s recent publications and to get an encapsulated view of what’s happening in the world of architecture. For the rest of the viewing public, many of the complicated renderings may be difficult to understand without the help of models. If you’re okay with that, enjoy the eye candy and the feeling that you have seen the future… or at least a flat version of it.

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3D:2D

The work in this show is divided into two rooms, the smaller of which is dedicated to Edwards’ 2007 ‘Ether Studies’ series of candy-colored inkjet prints on white paper. The pieces at first appear to be nothing more than bright, jumbled collages. On closer inspection, however, the images fall into Renaissance perspective, and the jumble turns out to be a streetscape of sorts, with pixelated people wandering between “buildings” made up of hovering clouds of disparate digital elements: blurry photographs, numbers, symbols, Japanese characters and snippets of Roman text. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/benjaminedwards1.jpg" alt="Benjamin Edwards, 'Ether Study (No money required just one click)' (2008)
58.5 x 77.5cm (77.5 x 96.0cm) Unique digital inkjet drawing on paper" title="Photo: Ikuhiro Watanabe; © Benjamin Edwards; Courtesy Tomio Koyama Gallery" width="518" height="388" class="imgcaption" />
The technology of digital printing gives these pieces a purity of color and a crispness of edge that would not be possible in any other medium. Edwards cleverly separates the image from the whiteness of the paper background by using subtle cream-colored ink to color the “sky.” In his world, as in much of Tokyo, architecture is delineated only by colorful signage and the sky serves simply as a pale backdrop to the action below.
Like Edwards’ digital prints, the large-scale paintings in the gallery’s main space appear abstract, forming dark camouflage-like patterns. But again closer attention is repaid as each canvas reveals a detailed cityscape rendered in strips of color that could be boulevards, empty lots, or parks. Multi-scaled grids suggest buildings of varying heights and typologies. 
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/benjaminedwards2.jpg" alt="Benjamin Edwards, 'Machines for Living' (2008) 
137.2 x 213.4 x 5cm, Acrylic on canvas" title="Photo: Ikuhiro Watanabe; © Benjamin Edwards; Courtesy Tomio Koyama Gallery" width="518" height="334" class="imgcaption" />
In fact these paintings present multiple views of the same cityscape. All of them were executed as variations upon the theme of another, larger painting that has occupied Edwards’ time for the past year: a monumental work called <a href="http://www.benjaminedwards.net/Projects/projects%20directory.htm">The Triumph of Democracy</a>. Commissioned for a corporate lobby in Washington D.C., Edwards’ home base, the painting depicts a single view of an imaginary metropolis that he and his studio assistants have painstakingly constructed using computer software.
Understandably, Edwards was eager to explore his digital city in the additional views exhibited here. In an email he wrote, “to create [The Triumph of Democracy] I constructed a virtual city […] and the space had a reality to it beyond the limits of the virtual camera I used for the composition. So I had a real desire to see what this city would look like from different angles. Because of the complexity of the architecture that I create, it’s not possible to see all of these buildings at the same time in the virtual space. The city exists as a hypothetical first, as a grouping of simple blocks, and only after a camera is fixed can the hard work of implementing the scene begin. Each building must be loaded then rendered separately. These images are then pieced together in Photoshop.”
<img src="http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/benjaminedwards3.jpg" alt="Benjamin Edwards, 'Worship' (2008) 137.2 x 213.4 x 5cm, Acrylic on canvas" title="Photo: Ikuhiro Watanabe; © Benjamin Edwards; Courtesy Tomio Koyama Gallery" width="518" height="335" class="imgcaption" />
For the pieces in this show, Edwards used a similar technique to construct birds’ eye views of his capital. The resulting images show fragmented high-rises, busy streets and flashing lights set against a textured backdrop of asphalt gray. 
Edwards’ one-man show here in Tokyo coincides with the group show “Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes” at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, where his paintings are on display alongside several architectural projects. It makes sense given the undeniably spatial implications of his work.
“People often ask me if I trained to be an architect because my work is so much about cities and architecture,” Edwards says. “But I really came to it from the ground up, first as an ordinary observer of my suburban and urban surroundings and later through my own research of architectural history. I think that I have architecture in my bones because I’m by nature a utopian and I believe in problem solving. At the same time I can see what a letdown almost all utopian architecture can be. So much of my work is about that disconnect between the hope and aspirations of the plans on the one hand and the almost inevitable failure of those plans on the other.”

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