When you visit Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (TOCAG), you half expect to get a concert, simply because of its name. But such conflation is not as crazy as it sounds. The aural and visual arts have many affinities, and the language of painting and music even share some terms in common, such as tone, rhythm and composition.
This, and the fact that the gallery is located in a multimedia arts complex, which includes concert halls, may have inclined the gallery's curators to favor shows with lyrical or musical qualities. This was certainly the case with one of the earliest exhibitions held here, "Tatsuoki Nambata: Symphony of Life — Creation and Development of Japanese Abstraction," which looked at the art of an abstract painter whose work has been noted for its musical resonances.
Now, 12 years later, TOCAG is showing the work of Nambata's son Fumio, whose paintings have strong lyrical and symbolic elements that seem directed at the aural and subconscious side of our brains, rather than the visual and conscious part.
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