In a documentary video published by Tate Modern to accompany its exhibition William Klein + Daido Moriyama in 2013, Moriyama, one of the most influential avantgarde photographers to emerge out of postwar Japan, roams the urban streets of Shinjuku equipped with a compact digital camera. Dressed in a low-key black jacket, his gait is relaxed but...

Lee Kit creates meditative installations—or 'situations', as the artist frequently calls them—by bringing together intangible elements, such as light and sound, with painting, moving image, and readymade objects. These situations often comprise paintings upon which light is cast from a projector, creating a visual experience more...

With only a matter of days until the opening of Art Fair Tokyo 2015 – shortly followed, it’s forecast, by the first cherry blossoms – what better time to explore the city. Organised into themes and districts, this guide offers a broad scope of contemporary art gallery and event recommendations. Not to mention a few treats in...

For more than 20 years the Tokyo-based contemporary artist Makoto Aida has offered an unflinching social commentary on Japan’s modern culture, highlighting the country’s complex norms, and exploring topics from sexuality to war. His works range widely from refined graphic paintings such as A Picture of an Air Raid on New York...

Two private collection shows in Japan this summer revealed radically different ways to present and interpret the role of the contemporary art collector.

Bye-Bye Kitty!!! at the Japan Society in New York in 2011 put a stop forever to the idea that Japanese art was just about the cute helplessness of “kawaii”: a pre-conception that was driven mainly by the super flat motifs of Murakami Takashi’s collaboration with Louis Vuitton where he re-worked the brand’s signature print...

Too many Tokyoites miss the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) altogether. Beyond both the Ueno museums and the network of newer art spaces in Roppongi, this institution of first-class exhibition facilities, a vast pubic art library and one of the most significant global collections of contemporary Japanese art takes you by surprise in Old...

Adrian Cheng, a supporter of arts development and education in Hong Kong and Asia, is the founder of K11 art malls and the non-profit K11 Art Foundation. The latter serves to support emerging artists and designers from Greater China, while also promoting art’s public reach through such initiatives as K11 Art Space Workshops, K11 Art...

The artist Pierre Alechinsky, a leading figure in the 1940s expressionist Cobra group, and the sculptor Fujiko Nakaya, the first artist to have worked with fog as a sculptural medium, have won 15 million yen each (around £100,000) as recipients of the 2018 Praemium Imperiale awards.

Glowing pumpkins, psychedelic polka dots and infinite mirror reflections: the grand dame of Japan's art world, Yayoi Kusama, has long been famed as the anti-queen of minimalism. So it might come as some surprise to see that a new Tokyo museum devoted to the 88-year-old artist is the antithesis of her eye-popping artworks. Instead, the Yayoi Kusama...

Last month in Paris, I met Emmanuel Perrotin - renowned Parisian Art dealer - at his Parisian gallery in Le Marais. Self made man and hard worker, he explained me his success story in the Art world while I was admiring JR 's giant photographies, Xavier Veilhan's sculptures and Chen Fei's pieces to name a few. En route with Emmanuel for an art...

While summer is generally known for being a slow time in the world art calendar, June in Tokyo proved to be one of the busiest months of the year, with the opening of the first Japan outpost of Galerie Perrotin, a large retrospective of a beloved Swiss sculptor and notable exhibitions showcasing established contemporary Japanese artists. Here are...

The Backers Foundation and AIT will co-present Shaping Voices, Silent Skies, an exhibition held from July 1 (Sat) to July 17 (Mon, National holiday) at 8/ ART GALLERY/ Tomio Koyama Gallery. This exhibition marks the 10th edition that the Backers Foundation and AIT have partnered on a joint residency programme that invites international artists to...

The paper in each part of Dorothea Rockburne's series Locus I-VI (1972) is pretty unforgiving. The mixture of lines and edges are slow to reveal detail and require more than a causal glance to let that detail sink in and solidify. But in the company of Korean painter Kwon Young-woo and Japanese artist Rakuko Naito, working with paper takes on...

Earth-stuff goes through myriad transformations on its path to usefulness in our world. Soil, stone, water, oil, plants, animals, and the rest all pass through processes of cleaning, smoothing, separating, reconstituting. And at the end of that violence is an exquisite, terrifying flatness: one that expresses itself through identical buildings,...

Charming Journey at Mori Art Museum in Tokyo marks Indian artist N. S. Harsha's first mid-career retrospective. Encompassing 75 major works made by N. S. Harsha since 1995, this retrospective explores the tensions between traditional and contemporary, individual and collective, earthy and cosmic in the artist's work. The exhibition, which also...