Kiyosumi galleries—new exhibits
The night of October 10 was rather busy with new shows opening in five of the Kiyosumi-Shirakawa art complex galleries. Atsushi Suwa’s hyper realist works on view at Kido Press Inc. challenge any preconceived media boundaries. Hiromiyoshii is hosting its first solo exhibits for two artists: the American T.J. Wilcox, showing his engrossing film narratives and multimedia montages; and the Okinawan born, New York based Futoshi Miyagi whose repositories of personal ephemera take shape of finely crafted paper mosaics set against the background of several small installations. Taka Ishii Gallery is presenting ten works (photographs and sculptures) by Yuki Kimura, tracing her preoccupation with visual memory and the notion of framing. Do not miss an interesting curatorial touch: an opaque life-size image of black Plexiglass opens the show making you second guess the meaning of other partially obscured found images from some seventy years ago. Next door, ShugoArts is holding its third exhibit of Leiko Ikemura’s tempera on jute paintings in which formal transparency (the weave of the support shows through) echoes content shifts between the imaginary and the real. Yutaka Watanabe’s work, including six new paintings where objects move in and out of focus are on view at the Tomio Koyama Gallery. One floor up, also at Tomio Koyama, award-winning Chinese artist Wei Jia is having his first Japanese show. Jia’s introspective canvases tackle the mysteries of imagination with their intermingling of awe and fear. Dimmed lights of the galleries add to the effect, giving just the perfect amount of exposure to the works’ acrylic impasto. All shows will be up through the end of the month, Ikemura is on view through November 21.
