Tag - art

 
 

ART

Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 16, 2018
The cosmic talents of Noriyoshi Ohrai
It must have been nonstop monsters, warships, hunks and epic boobage for much of Noriyoshi Ohrai's life.
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / 20 QUESTIONS
Jan 13, 2018
Mural painter can't relax in bathhouses
Name: Mizuki Tanaka
Japan Times
COMMUNITY / Our Lives / WHY DID YOU LEAVE JAPAN?
Jan 13, 2018
Artist Naoko Tanaka uses light, space and objects to explore the 'unknowable inner outside world'
Performance artist feels immense pressure to fit into a mold in Japan.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Jan 2, 2018
The zero hour of Kobe's avant-garde
Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art's present draw card is the Saint Petersburg collection, "Old Masters from the State Hermitage Museum." But on a lower level, at the far end of a long corridor gallery, are photos and grainy videos — the small-scale documentation of one of Japan's little-known postwar...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Dec 12, 2017
Asia in the wings of Japan's art scene
"Tis the season to be jolly ... circumspect. As regards art, despite suggestions from some art professionals that biennials and other recurring art festivals are an exhausted format, 2017 offered up an embarrassment of riches, some more embarrassing than others as it turned out.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Dec 12, 2017
It has been a year of new museums, galleries and inventive renovations
From polka-dot emporiums and oceanfront observatories to a new-generation castle museum, a raft of eclectic new cultural spaces have been showcased over the past year across Japan. Here are a few highlights that have either opened or been renovated across the country in recent months.
CULTURE / Art
Dec 12, 2017
Bohemia along the Sumida: In search of cultural capital
On paper, the Japanese government supports the arts, which are considered important vehicles for promoting Japanese culture globally, enhancing the country's image as a tourist destination and stimulating declining regional economies. But, where does the content for Japan's increasing number of art festivals...
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Dec 5, 2017
Hokusai's great wave that swept Europe
Innovative, creative, and immensely prolific, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) was celebrated during his lifetime in his native Japan. His works were among the first major examples of Japanese art to be widely appreciated overseas in the second half of the 19th century.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Nov 28, 2017
The beginning, end and rebirth of sculpture
The subtitle given to the retrospective of the 60-year career of Osaka-based Michio Fukuoka is oxymoronic: "A Sculptor Who No Longer Sculpts." He used to, but became frustrated and filled with doubt about creativity and so he made sculpture anyway, often about "doing nothing."
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Nov 14, 2017
Sachiko Kodama's laws of attraction
Entering the tatami-mat tearoom-style exhibition spaces at the back of Kyoto's specialist pewter art craft gallery, Seikado, spectators are apprised that the magnetism of the pieces on display might interfere with the strips on their credit cards. Those fitted with pacemakers are also asked to stand...
Japan Times
WORLD
Nov 5, 2017
Elephant's paintings auctioned in Hungary
Paintings created by an Indian elephant who enjoys wielding a brush were auctioned off by a Hungarian traveling circus on Saturday.
CULTURE / Art
Oct 31, 2017
What makes a National Treasure?
Together, Japan's National Treasures provide a cacophonous ode to the nation and its heritage for its historical, cultural, geographical and stylistic dissonances. Yet, this is the first time in 41 years that 210 such works (or sets) have been displayed en masse.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 24, 2017
Motonobu: The father of Kano styles
A family-run enterprise, the Kano school of painting was a consistent force in Japan's art world for more than 300 years, from the Muromachi Period (1336-1573) up until its fortune waned in the 19th century.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Books
Oct 21, 2017
'Okinawa': Remembering Takuma Nakahira in a different light
A figure stood on Zushi Beach in Kanagawa Prefecture one night in 1973, silhouetted against a fire as he fed piles of prints and negatives — the bulk of his photographic work so far — into the flames.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 8, 2017
Drawing on Japan's flowers of the flock
Masumi Yamanaka, curator of 'Flora Japonica,' an exhibition of 80 taxonomically correct illustrations of Japanese plants, talks about the dedication that drives botanical art.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Entertainment news
Oct 8, 2017
Performance artists in China feeling the chill from official disapproval
One woman, a performance artist from Taiwan, tied herself up with bras, but left her nipples exposed. Another artist, a Romanian woman in a bathing suit, had someone write the Chinese characters for "control" and "art" across her buttocks.
Japan Times
CULTURE / Art
Oct 3, 2017
In the right light, every detail counts
At the tail end of an unexpectedly long conversation, the last question I ask photographer Keizo Kitajima is why it's important for him to have even lighting across the image. The photographs he is showing at the Photographers' Gallery in Shinjuku are part of his long-running "Untitled Records" series...
Japan Times
WORLD
Sep 30, 2017
16th-century drawing may be sketch by Leonardo da Vinci for the 'Mona Lisa'
A French art expert believes a charcoal drawing kept in a collection for more than 150 years may be a preparatory sketch by Leonardo da Vinci for the "Mona Lisa."

Longform

Professional cleaner Hirofumi Sakurai takes a moment to appreciate some photographs in a Gotanda apartment whose occupant died alone.
The last cleanup: Life and death in a lonely Japan