Midori Matsui

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  picks June 05, 2018

  “Beach, Eyelids, and Curtains: chelfitsch's EIZO-Theater”

  Toshiki Okada is a playwright and the director of the Japanese theater group chelfitsch, which is internationally admired for its intensely emotional yet conceptually controlled minimalist performing style. The group wrings rumors, whispers, and the minute gestures of everyday life to extract the mounting self-doubt and political awareness of Japanese youth. Okada's first museum solo exhibition features eizo theater, a new method of performance that incorporates film projection.

  Collaborating with film director Shinpei Yamada and architect Jo Nagasaka, Okada has fashioned a space in which spectators

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  print October 2013

  Yuki Katsura

  Yuki Katsura (1913–1991) was a female pioneer of the avant-garde whose prolific career encompassed the diverse fields of painting, collage, book design, and illustration, as well as writing essays and travelogues. This impressive range was fully on view in the comprehensive retrospective organized by Naoko Seki, the senior curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT), in collaboration with fellow MOT curator Mihoko Nishikawa and the curatorial team at the Shimonoseki City Art Museum (where the show traveled subsequently) to celebrate the centennial of the artist’s birth.

  The installation

• previews September 2013

  “Out of Doubt: Roppongi Crossing 2013”

  For this fourth iteration of the Mori Art Museum’s comprehensive triennial of contemporary Japanese art, the institution’s chief curator, Mami Kataoka, is joined by guest curators from the US and Australia. Together, they have selected a group of thirty participants, which (unlike in years past) also includes expatriate Japanese artists and those of Japanese descent: Ei Arakawa, Aki Sasamoto, and Simon Fujiwara, to name a few. The roster is further expanded with work by several postwar artists such as Genpei Akasegawa, Hiroshi Nakamura,

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  print May 2013

  “Jikken Kōbō—Experimental Workshop”

  Jikken Kōbō, or Experimental Workshop, was a renowned Japanese art-and-performance collective of exceptional diversity. The group consisted of five visual artists, five composers (some of whom, including Toru Takemitsu, would later achieve international fame), a pianist, a lighting designer, an engineer, and a music critic/poet—all of whom gathered around the well-known art critic Shuzo Takiguchi, who gave the group its name. From 1951 until their disbanding in 1957, they produced and presented experimental stage performances and concerts of avant-garde music, playing pieces composed by

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  print May 2012

  Fuyuko Matsui

  With more than one hundred paintings and drawings, Fuyuko Matsui’s solo exhibition “Becoming Friends with All the Children in the World” demonstrated a unique vision that embraces death and the dissolution of identity as a means of inspiring passion for life. The paintings are mostly done in the traditional Nihonga style, with powdered mineral pigments on silk, and Matsui succeeds in showing that this eclectic genre of painting—which was established in the late nineteenth century and amalgamates various classical Japanese and Chinese techniques while accepting Western models of realistic

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  print January 2012

  “Metabolism: City in the Future”

  This exhibition is the first ever to provide a comprehensive overview of Metabolism, the internationally acclaimed Japanese avant-garde architectural movement of the 1960s. With a spectacular installation of more than five hundred objects and documents representing some eighty projects, it provides plural contexts for interpreting the movement. The exhibition’s main thesis is that Metabolism inherited the “nation-building” spirit from prewar land-development projects and postwar reconstruction plans for Japanese cities, including Kenzo Tange and others’ master plan for Hiroshima and the Hiroshima

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  print December 2011

  Yoko Ono

  This exhibition, held in celebration of Yoko Ono’s winning the Hiroshima Art Prize (an award dedicated to artists who have contributed to the preservation of “the spirit of Hiroshima”), demonstrated the strength of Ono’s art and the ways it is sustained by its confrontation with the absurdities of life and by the artist’s knack for firing the spectator’s imagination while using simple, everyday objects. She teaches us to turn physical perceptions into philosophical interpretations.

  Maintaining Ono’s clean, poetically allusive, open-ended visual vocabulary, the show responded both to the special

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  picks November 16, 2011

  Tomoko Yoneda

  Tomoko Yoneda, an artist known for her cool allegorical photographs of sites of historical trauma, recently turned her lens to a series of Japanese-style houses in Taipei. These homes had belonged to families associated with the imperialist Japanese government and were built between 1895 and 1945, during the colonial occupation. (They include, for instance, the residence of General Wang Shu-Ming, chief of staff under Chiang Kai-shek and a Japanese house at the Beitou Hot Springs, known then as the “Hakone of Taiwan.”) The coexistence of the past and the present in the residences, now abandoned

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  previews May 2011

  Atsuko Tanaka

  This career-spanning retrospective is Japanese avant-gardist Atsuko Tanaka’s first monographic exhibition in the UK and, gathering ninety pieces under one roof, the most comprehensive in Europe to date.

  This career-spanning retrospective is Japanese avant-gardist Atsuko Tanaka’s first monographic exhibition in the UK and, gathering ninety pieces under one roof, the most comprehensive in Europe to date. Ikon’s thoughtful selection—which will include the artist’s famed 1956 Electric Dress and a re-creation of her 1955 Gutaï installation Work (Bell), as well as numerous later drawings and the eye-popping lacquer paintings made just before her death in 2005—cuts to the heart of her unfailing commitment to isolating the affective qualities of

• previews May 2011

  Yokohama Triennale 2011

  The Fourth Yokohama Triennale looks to art as a portal to “magic”—what we intuit to lie beyond or beneath the technologically controlled structures and administrative procedures of our globalized world.

  Taking its thematic title, “Our Magic Hour,” from a sculpture by Ugo Rondinone (in which a billboard-size rainbow of text spells out the same), the Fourth Yokohama Triennale looks to art as a portal to “magic”—what we intuit to lie beyond or beneath the technologically controlled structures and administrative procedures of our globalized world. As the show’s subtitle asks, “How much of the world can we know?” The Yokohama Museum of Art and BankART Studio NYK will serve as primary venues for this psychic expedition, while throughout the city a whole range

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  print April 2011

  Yutaka Sone

  Yutaka Sone’s playful pursuit of the imaginary, the realm of fantasy, and physical affects provides a powerful alternative to the prevalent tendency of contemporary Japanese sculpture to simulate subcultural icons. Since his public emergence in 1993, Sone has placed contradiction at the core of his artistic practice, making gratuitous efforts for an apparently incidental purpose, or capturing in sculpture heightened perceptions of specific places—perceptions frequently attained through the disruption of habit by means of travel and athletics—turning the transient effects of light,

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  picks March 11, 2011

  Ryan Gander

  For the sixth edition of the annual art project sponsored by Japan’s Dazaifu Tenmangu shrine, the 1,100-year-old site of Shinto worship in the region of Fukuoka, British artist Ryan Gander has created two indoor installations and four outdoor sculptures, among other works. Among the installations is As Reliable as Change, 2011, a dark, empty room constructed inside the shrine’s treasure hall, wherein a theatrical set offers the simulated sight of the forest outdoors to anyone who glances at a narrow horizontal window set high in a wall. Outside, viewers encounter Metaverse, 2010, which comprises