Jiro Takamatsu (1936–1998) was about as seminal as seminal gets in postwar Japanese art. He was one-third of the Tokyo-based Happenings group Hi Red Center, a progenitor of Japanese conceptual art, an…
This heartbreaking show consisted of Leo Twiggs’s “Requiem for Mother Emanuel”—a cycle of nine small paintings responding to one of the most horrific racially motivated hate crimes in the United State…
The photograph accompanying this review looks better than the actual work on the wall. The photograph looks like a painting, and feels like earnest art. The actual work looks flimsy and feels flippant…
Once upon a time, in the mid-’90s, contemporary art and more academic fine art were still on good terms in Japan. Mono-ha and abstraction were living traditions, allowing artists to wax metaphoric abo…
The fifth anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, on March 11, and the subsequent tsunami and Fukushima nuclear meltdown has come and gone as I write this. It was a full-time job running aroun…
Between Pop art and Takashi Murakami’s Superflat lies a minefield of bad taste, a universe of objectified femininity and commodified childhood, endless poop and booby jokes, frivolous consumerism and…
The return of Okinawa to Japan in 1972 meant a rethink for photographers. The American bases remained, still spewing drunken soldiers and polluting aircraft, but they no longer seemed quite the…
The brainchild of Tokyo-based art troupe Chim-Pom, “Don’t Follow the Wind” is an international group exhibition located inside the Fukushima Exclusion Zone, the roughly 300 square miles of land near t…
Under the direction of artist Jitish Kallat (b. 1974), the Kochi-Muziris Biennale brings together some 90 individual artists and groups, nearly half from India and the rest from 29 other countries…