Ai Weiwei at Misa Shin Gallery
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Tokyo Metro Manners Posters
The new Tokyo Metro manners poster is out. This one is about helping an old lady to get her parcel off the luggage shelf. It might now be as entertaining as a 2009 poster of a hammered salaryman surrounded by beer cans, or a 2010 one with an obliging dude sporting an afro, a hawaiian shirt and a pair of getas, he getting ready to haul a heavy suitcase for a grandma with a newborn; but, all the usual tropes are in place: gawking (approving/disapproving) bystander, vaguely foreign-looking woman who is learning her good manners, a local in need of help or consideration. The inscriptions vary between “Please do it again” (approved behaviors) and “Please do it at home” (disapproved behaviors). This series, that has been running since 2008 trumps multiple other manner posters with its bold graphics golden yellow background, Ben-day dots, and laconic yet contrived subject matter . You can browse older posters here. Follow the link to the Japanese language site and click on 2008, 2009, and 2010.
Emilia and Ilya Kabakov: Artists’ Talk
Just watched a 2005 interview with the Kabakovs available as a podcast on the Tate webpage.
Oldenburg Giant Saw in Odaiba
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Happy New Year! Top Tokyo Exhibitions of 2010
To celebrate the glorious end of Tokyo’s 2010 exhibition year I put together the list of three of my favorite shows of the year. For the sake of even distribution I picked one show by an emerging gallery, one show by an established gallery and one museum show.
Venue: TANA Bookshelf Gallery
Exhibition: SHIBUHAUSE installation
Why: TANA was my most exciting discovery of the year. This new gallery unhinged itself from the constrictions brought on by commercial pressures without compromising its creative ambitions. Great new addition to the Tokyo art world.
Venue: Rat Hole Gallery
Exhibition: Miwa Yanagi “Lullaby”
Lullaby, 2009, 12 minutes, edition of 5, image courtesy of the gallery
Why: This show cleverly combined the works from an older photographic series Fairy Tales (2004–2006) and Yanagi’s new video work Lullaby (2009), using the images in the photographs as a poetic key to unlock symbolic cache of the video. I reviewed this exhibition for May 2010 issue of Artforum.
Venue: Mori Art Museum
Exhibition: Roppongi Crossing: Can there be Art?
KAMI & friends scateboarding performance, photo Joji Shimamoto
Why: Mori Museum’s super-sized exhibition, for all the faults other reviewers noticed, definitely succeeded in showing the multifarious character of contemporary Japanese art.
Leo Rubinfein at Taka Ishii
Taka Ishii (left) with Leo Runinfien
The last opening of 2010 was for Leo Rubinfien’s show at the Taka Ishii gallery. Rubinfien, who was raised in Tokyo but now lives in New York, came to prominence in the 1980s as a proponent of color photography. The photographs (ink jet prints) on view in the current show were taken over the period of some twenty years in locations all over the world. Taka Ishii is now closed for the holidays and will reopen January 6th, the show will be on through January 29th.
