TOKYO—ArtInfo’s correspondent in Japan takes us on a tour of the best exhibitions on view in Tokyo this month, including the annual trend-spotting survey of Japanese art at The Museum of Contemporary Art; new pigment on paper work by the long-established Rieko Hidaka at Tomio Koyama Gallery; and Shizuka Yokomizo’s videos that draw together parallel lives at Wako Works of Art.

MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS

 

Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo
“MOT Annual 2007: From a World as Large as Life
Through Apr. 1, 2007

The always-anticipated “MOT Annual” (MOT standing for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo) surveys all that is hot in contemporary Japanese art. This year curator Kiyomi Yonezaki selected a roster of artists who speculate about “how we want to live and relate to other people and things.”

Sayaka Akiyama walks around in a strange environment and then makes embroidery stitches of the streets she has covered on an enlarged map. A new piece, made for the exhibitions, charts the contemporary art museum’s neighborhood in colorful stitches on a large blank fabric. Both a contemporary map of the area and one from the 19th century are projected onto the fabric, allowing the viewer to follow the artist as she attempts to grasp local history with her own footsteps.

Yuri Shibata investigates the line between her life and the rest of the word. Making paint from material things that have a special significance to her, such as a favorite stuffed animal or her own hair, she then uses it to make paintings of those objects. For example, the particularly corporal Material Colors No. 41 Lipstick is a tube of lipstick made from the artist’s own blood.

Naoko Chiba, on the other hand, draws connections between herself and what she may have left behind by documenting her farming village in northern Japan. She photographs her ancestors and old buildings with primitive cyanotype technique, which uses sunlight to print and produces blue-toned images that are reverent and sweet without being overly sentimental.

An installation piece, Private Castle, by Daisuke Nakayama, consists of several objects that look like crouching men covered up with a blankets. They each occupy the minimal space needed for human living and a few antennas sticking out of their backs, supposedly to consume information. Taken as a whole, the work questions what conditions are essential to the survival of modern individuals and the foundations of contemporary communities.

GALLERY EXHIBITIONS

 

Ota Fine Arts
“Takao Minami—In Penta”
Through Feb. 17, 2007

The central work in Osaka-born artist Takao Minami’s new show is In Penta (2006). It looks like a painting—except the images it depicts keep moving. Projected on a widescreen television placed vertically on the floor, a scene showing two women dancing on a boat dominates the bottom part of the screen, while the upper half is divided into fields that resemble blue and purple skies with birds periodically fluttering through them. The colors, which recall watercolor pigments, continuously change in tone and hue, and by the end of a 19-minute cycle, both become more yellow than blue or purple.

To create the collage of moving images, the artist combined two sets of video: enlarged, blurred images of bugs (they were not birds, after all) flying over a pond, and dancers on a slow boat. “He takes motifs from everyday life and processes and modifies the images with cutting-edge technology to produce surprising effects,” said Hidenori Ota, director of the gallery, Ota Fine Arts.

Another video installation in the show, puppet study #1, is an image of a sunrise projected onto a narrow shutter, which slowly opens and closes while hanging in the center of the gallery’s ceiling. When closed, one sees the sunrise on the shutter; when open, it projects onto the far wall. The most striking thing about the work is its simple manipulation of perspective, and like In Penta, it is clever and well executed.

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Tomio Koyama Gallery
“Rieko Hidaka”
Through Feb. 24, 2007

For more than 20 years, Rieko Hidaka has been making monochrome paintings and prints of trees—the same set of trees—but her new work at Tomio Koyama Gallery still seems fresh.