Since the emergence of conceptual art in the 1960s, artistic skill and superlative craftsmanship came to be derided as almost artistic embarrassment, a suspect accusation leveled at the supposed old guard who took pride in their technical proficiency. Think of Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol, their artistic factories where the artist oversaw but did not make, or the word-instruction "poems" of Yoko Ono, performed by others.
The best, recent contemporary Japanese art has almost entirely eschewed this, instead reveling in myopic and superlative artistry with occasional forays into transforming seemingly moribund traditions.
Tetsuya Noguchi, whose work is on show at Asahi Beer Oyamazaki Villa Museum of art, is exemplary. He makes relatively small-scale figurines of samurai warriors that play into the Japanese subcultural fetish for such objects, though the expectation that such a description suggests should quickly be abandoned. His works are mostly imaginary figures sculpted in plastic and resin. But it is his visual and historical research into samurai armor, helmets and weapons, and his comical improvements, that keep the viewer entirely absorbed. Labored, miniature and perceptive in detail, the 90 or so works, some paintings, have an outsized impact that defies their often-diminutive statures.
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