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November 22, 2024
 

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Matthew Larking
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
May 23, 2017
Kaikei: the name behind the gods
Kamakura Period (1185-1333) Buddhist sculptures often come down to us under the individual names of makers (when known) though they were often fashioned in workshops by multiple hands. A significant 13th-century work would employ a dozen or so team members and assistants and draw on multiple specialists....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Apr 25, 2017
Kaiho Yusho: painting privilege
The Momoyama Period (1573-1615) artist Kaiho Yusho (1533-1615) was renowned among the elite painters of his time, and still is. More remarkable, however, is that fame came when he was in his 60s during what is called his "early" period. Over the following two decades, he went from painting for priests...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Apr 18, 2017
Kyotographie: from Kyoto, with love
Kyotographie — the brainchild of photographer Lucille Reyboz and lighting artist Yusuke Nakanishi — is 5 this year. Conceived and nurtured in Kyoto, it is now one of few substantial photography festivals in Japan, inarguably rivaling, even surpassing, many of the country's other calendar art events....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Mar 28, 2017
The tortured artist is not just a cliche
Sai Hashizume's latest exhibition of precision realist painting, "This Isn't Happiness," is about updating some of the masters of Western art history. In her five new works, she deals prominently with the surrealist Rene Magritte and Vincent Van Gogh. She also adopts the ominous chiaroscuro of 17th-century...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Mar 14, 2017
Masaaki Yamada: A painter of all stripes and colors
Masaaki Yamada (1929-2010) is like a mystery man of modernism. He apparently had no specialist art training of note and is known only by a skeleton biography that is mostly blank before 1943, and patchy thereafter. Said to have begun painting from the so-called tabula rasa of bombed out World War II...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Feb 28, 2017
Coutelas: Outside the outsiders
Robert Coutelas (1930-85) was born into a poor French family who lived in a single room, and he died in a similar, pathetically impoverished, way. Nearly every opportunity life afforded he either abandoned or would broker no compromise for the sake of art. Now, 160 small works pay tribute to his vision...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Feb 14, 2017
Between realism and abstraction
Since impressionism had, at its extremities, given rise to the expressionists Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, the postwar painter Jean-Michel Atlan said great art could only be made in the margins.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 31, 2017
The future looks bright for artists in the ancient capital
"Kyoto Art For Tomorrow" at The Museum of Kyoto draws together single pieces by 43 up-and-coming artists under the age of 40. Focusing on a new generation, the exhibition looks forward to the international attention Japan will receive for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Indeed, the show adopts Pierre de Coubertin...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 17, 2017
Taking an art trip through time
"The State of This World: Thought and the Arts," the second of the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History's "Art Trip" exhibitions, this time focuses on four contemporary artists' works that are in some instances inspired by archaeology. They address issues of seen and unseen worlds, life and death, and...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 10, 2017
World War II: Yasuka Goto gets up close and personal
Some artists from earlier generations like Tsuguharu Foujita (also known as Leonard Foujita) have been "outed" in the past decade or two and are now almost celebrated for producing incredibly complex propaganda paintings complicit with Japan's World War II ideology. For others, however, such politics...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 3, 2017
Early birds do more than catch worms
In the battle of Zodiac animals vs. all the others, it's the rooster who performs the victory dance.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Dec 13, 2016
Young artists to keep your eye on
In Kurt Vonnegut's 1982 novel "Deadeye Dick," a Japanese man walks into an all-night drugstore and gestures for the protagonist, Rudy Waltz, to follow him outdoors. There they gaze at the decapitated cupola of Rudy's childhood home, glistening white in the moonlight. It reminds the homesick man of Mount...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Nov 29, 2016
A play on the idea of performance art
By the late 1960s, Japan's early postwar avant-garde had largely petered out. The radicals of yesteryear were now 20 years older and the country had returned to material affluence and international acceptance symbolized by the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Nov 15, 2016
Kyoto museum celebrates the works of native son Ito Jakuchu
In 2000, the Kyoto National Museum commemorated the death of Ito Jakuchu (1716-1800) with an exhibition that generated a surge of interest in the artist. The boom has possibly reached its zenith this year, which marks the 300th anniversary of his birth.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Nov 1, 2016
Every hero has a few human flaws
Ryoma Sakamoto (1835-1867), among Japan's most beloved heroes, came of age when U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry's Black Ships arrived demanding trade relations and ending the country's closed-door foreign policy. The old Japan ruled by the feudal Tokugawa shogunate was giving way to the modern nation state....
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Sep 13, 2016
Yosa Buson: A Japan-China relationship that works
Of all the eminent Edo Period Japanese artists being celebrated this year, the honors have definitively gone to the eccentric painter Ito Jakuchu (1603-1868), whose 300th anniversary is celebrated in at least four retrospectives nationwide, some recently finished and others forthcoming Artists' reputations...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 30, 2016
The 'informel' whirlwind that swept across Japan
Taro Okamoto's "Men Aflame" (1955) is a swirling fusion of figuration, surrealism and abstraction. The content addresses the irradiation of Japanese sailors onboard the Dai-go Fukuryu-maru by fallout from American nuclear testing on Bikini Atoll. The painting is part of the 1950s Japanese art movement...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Aug 16, 2016
Salvador Dali: a life less ordinary
The early literary surrealists of the mid-1920s were skeptical of any visual possibility. Their aim — to fuse art with life, reality and dreams — was to be realized through the immediacy of writing. Painting, by contrast, was a laborious, indirect expression mediated by style and technique. Andre...
CULTURE / Art
Aug 9, 2016
Foujita's struggle between Paris and Tokyo
Few Japanese artists have received the extremes of acclaim and censure that Leonard Foujita (Tsuguharu Fujita, 1886-1968) has. Based in Paris from 1913 he became Japan's only painter of international significance at that time, and by the 1920s, he commanded prices comparable to Picasso. As a leading...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jul 5, 2016
The embellished world of Kozan Miyagawa's ceramics
In 1954-55, three Kyoto ceramists of the Sodeisha group of artists began a revolution by creating objects that fulfilled no practical role.
Two of America’s biggest debt holders are dumping Treasurys
The U.S. Treasury building in Washington. Investors in Japan and China sold a pile of U.S. debt in the last quarter, just before the U.S. presidential election.
Ishiba aggravates his own political failures with diplomatic faux pas
Prime Minster Shigeru Ishiba is greeted at the APEC summit in Lima by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday. The Japanese leader was criticized for remaining seated while meeting several world leaders at the event.
Japan's 3.31 million visitors in October set monthly record
Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto in December 2023. Famous autumn leaf colors contributed to increased tourism demand last month from many markets across Asia, Europe and North America, the Japan National Tourism Organization has said.
Japan ranks last in romance satisfaction for second straight year
In a survey of 31 countries, Japan ranked last in terms of those who felt loved, with just 51% of respondents saying so.
Ruling coalition and DPP strike last-minute deal over economic policy
DPP policy chief Makoto Mahaguchi speaks at the party's policy gathering in Tokyo on Wednesday.
Japan, U.K. and Italy discuss inviting more countries to joint fighter project
A new concept model of a next-generation fighter jet to be jointly developed by Japan, Britain and Italy is on display in Farnborough, Hampshire, in July.
Haruki Murakami's 'The City and Its Uncertain Walls' gives deep deja vu
For “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” translated into English by Philip Gabriel, Haruki Murakami confronts the ghosts who won't leave him alone.
Japanese expats in Asia find community through rugby
The Taiwan Fivewoods celebrate their victory at the 2023 Asian Japanese Rugby Cup in December of last year.
In Fukushima, a weekend of prose, poetry and translation
Aomori-based writer JJ Carter presented on tabletop gaming as creative inspiration for building characters and narratives.
For Dr. Nakamats, aging is just experience in action
Though he didn't win the recent gubernatorial election in Tokyo, the 96-year-old Dr. Nakamats' run was seen as inspirational in Japan's aging society.

Podcast

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.
Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Longform

Construction takes place on the Takanawa Gateway Convention Center in Tokyo, slated to open in 2025.
A boom for business tourism in Japan?
By Kathryn Wortley

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