Must-See Exhibitions During Tokyo Gendai and Beyond
Morimura Yasumasa, Une Moderne Olympia 2018 (2017–2018). C-print, transparent medium. 210 x 300 cm. Collection Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Photo: Muto Shigeo.
Explore the most exciting exhibitions in Tokyo's museums and galleries ahead of the inaugural Tokyo Gendai art fair (7–9 July 2023). Highlights include a playful group exhibition at Watari-um, Hirofumi Katayama's 'electric sheep' at Taro Nasu, and solo shows by painters Lauren Quin and Cristina BanBan.
WORLD CLASSROOM: Contemporary Art through School Subjects
Mori Art Museum
19 April–24 September 2023
Expect: an A+ visual essay on artists' role as researchers and innovators.
Mori Art Museum has used the classroom to frame their blockbuster 20th-anniversary exhibition, proposing that contemporary artists can break new ground in any discipline. Over 150 works are included in the show, which is organised into sections named after school subjects such as Social Studies, Music, and Philosophy.
Among the highlights is Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Shovels (1965), in which the pioneering conceptual artist simultaneously exhibited a shovel, a photograph of the shovel, and an enlarged copy of the dictionary definition of the word 'shovel' as an exploration of the relationship between objects and representations.
One unexpected inclusion is not an artwork but a blackboard written on by social-sculpture champion Joseph Beuys for a lecture he gave at Tokyo University of the Arts in 1984. WORLD CLASSROOM also includes new commissions by Haegue Yang, Tomie Ohtake, Jacob Kirkegaard, Park McArthur, and Miyanaga Aiko.
Play Play Art
Watari-um | The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art
19 March–3 August 2023
Expect: a six-metre-tall star-faced angel presiding over a collection of determinedly intriguing objects.
If Mori Art Museum's show is a classroom, Watari-um's current exhibition is recess.
Motohiko Odani's Surf Angel (Provisional Monument 2) (2021) was created for Ishinomaki city's Reborn-Art Festival. It now presides over Play Play Art, a selection of 150 works by 19 artists. Odani says the angel's star-head 'represents a vehicle to another world', while her clothes are borrowed from the statue of the Nike of Samothrace.
Other highlights include Nam June Paik's Robot K-567 (1993); Fabrice Hyber's L'Homme de Bessines (1988–98), a spaceman-green humanoid who leaks water from 11 holes in his body; and photographs of mutant and costumed figures by Diane Arbus and Joel-Peter Witkin.
ABSTRACTION: The Genesis and Evolution of Abstract Painting Cézanne, Fauvism, Cubism and on to Today
Artizon Museum
3 June–20 August 2023
Expect: a comprehensive retelling of abstract art from its origins to contemporary expressions in both the West and the East.
The Artizon Museum gathers an impressive selection of some 250 works in an ambitious exhibition of abstraction, understood in its myriad expressions from Impressionism to Fauvism, Cubism, and more. Giants of abstraction such as Mark Rothko, Georgia O'Keeffe, Joan Miró, and Zao Wou-ki are on show.
Highlights include Paul Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir (c. 1904–06), František Kupka's Study on Red Ground (c. 1919), and Helen Frankenthaler's Bending Blue (1977).
The exhibition also explores the parallel development of abstraction in Japan, with works by painters such as Koga Harue and Hasegawa Saburo offering an insight into early 20th-century Japanese modernism. Contemporary artists in the show include Rita Ackermann, Lou Zhenggang, and Tsugami Miyuki.
How I feel is not your problem, period.
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
15 July–5 November 2023
Expect: a meditation on the possibilities and limits of empathy.
While the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo is closed during Tokyo Gendai, it reopens with a suite of exhibitions the following week, including a major survey of works by David Hockney.
Most intriguing, though, is How I feel is not your problem, period., an exhibition with an agenda—to give teenagers permission not to empathise. One of the most emotionally sophisticated exhibitions in recent memory presents work by five Japanese artists: Shigeo Arikawa, Makiko Yamamoto, Atsushi Watanabe (I'm here project), Riki Takeda, and Kayako Nakashima. Each artist endeavours to empathise with others, even as some express scepticism of the possibility of arriving at any deep level of understanding.
Works include a video installation of a fictional job fair by Shigeo Arikawa and an installation by Makiko Yamamoto documenting her research into legendary giants and the people who believe in them.
Lauren Quin: Salon Real
Blum and Poe Tokyo
5 July–10 August 2023
Expect: electric abstract paintings that look like they've just exploded from a party popper.
Lauren Quin's paintings are high voltage. Though rendered in oil on canvas, they glow like neon and shine like polished metals.
Tube-like forms run through much of Quin's works, suggesting snakes, dragons, wires, or pipes in a heady mix of infrastructure and mythology.
Born in Los Angeles in 1992, Quin completed a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA at the Yale School of Art. Her first U.S. museum show, My Hellmouth, wrapped up at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas earlier this month. Salon Real is Quin's debut exhibition in Japan.
Hirofumi Katayama: Making Sheep
Taro Nasu
30 June–29 July, 2023
Expect: deceptive 'photographs' derived from the artist's own dataset.
Before the 1982 Ridley Scott film Blade Runner, there was Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Hirofumi Katayama explores the collapsing divide between 'real' images and AI replicants—including ersatz sheep—in his first solo exhibition in over a decade.
For Making Sheep, Katayama fed a large number of his own photographs into a generative adversarial network (GAN), which then produced the images in the exhibition.
Katayama has been creating what he calls 'fake photographs' for over a decade now, starting with his 'Vectorscapes' image series, presented at Taro Nasu in 2013. For these, the artist converted image data into numerical values to create computer graphics that looked like photographs.
The exhibition is an opportunity to see how Katayama is thinking about AI images, whose implications the rest of us are still scrambling to comprehend.
Cristina BanBan: Figura
Perrotin Tokyo
5 July–19 August 2023
Expect: powerful female figures folding space-time in the history of art.
Spanish artist Cristina BanBan populates her canvases with powerful women who are often described as 'muscular'.
Much of their strength comes from the way BanBan frames them, often including two or three figures who consume space, extending off the canvas. Sometimes the same figure is presented several times, animating the subject as if she's taking selfies.
BanBan has been making waves at auction, tripling estimates at Christie's, Sotheby's, and Phillips in recent years. Her painting La Fatiga Que Me Das (You Exhaust Me) (2019), which depicts a pile of fleshy faces and wrinkled fingers, brought in £163,800 (208,000 USD) at Christie's London in February this year. —[O]
