An interesting look at Tokyo juxtaposing a car-ride on the Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway taken from Tarkowsky‘s 1972 film Solaris with the same ride filmed in 2005.
http://www.fischerelsani.net/kelvin/tme_v.html
Via vvork.
The New York Times has an interesting audio visual piece on Japanese photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki, who is suddenly gaining a bit of interest again in the US, for his documenting of couples having sex and the peeping toms who observed them in Tokyo parks in the 1970s.
“What is so striking … is that everyone is crossing the line. The couples who engage in sex in public, the peeping toms who tresspass on that intimacy, he photographer who has betrayed his acquaintances’ trust, and of course, us, so willing to look at what was not meant for us to see.”
Yoshiyuki’s exhibition at Tokyo’s Komai Gallery in 1979 was an underground success. For the exhibition the photos were blown up to life-size, the gallery lights were turned off, and visitors to the gallery were given flashlights. But shorly after the show, fearing recriminations, Yoshiyuki destroyed the prints.
The photos, simply entitled The Park, resurfaced last year, with the publication of The Photobook: A History, Volume II, by Martin Parr. Parr writes:
“The Park is “a brilliant piece of social documentation, capturing perfectly the loneliness, sadness, and desperation that so often accompany sexual or human relationships in a big, hard metropolis like Tokyo.”
Gallery link: Yossi Milo Gallery
Via Funkalicious
I checked out the Hitotsubo Photography Exhibition at Guardian Garden this morning, and now wished I had seen it earlier so I could have recommended it for this week’s upcoming HYPTYO list (Closes Thursday, Sep 6th) . I’m not usually a fan of art competitions (you could argue that as an oxymoron, actually), but the photography here was great. Each artists was given 1.82 x 1.82m space to show their photographs. Most were interesting, but one of my favorites was Susumu Shimonishi:
It’s a simple idea: travel the world with a remote shutter release, capturing self portraits in various places (Istanbul, NYC, Disneyland).
But may fave part is at the top left corner of his space. Called “I Am On the Air,” that’s exactly what it is: him with a camera behind TV reporters in Tokyo, Sapporo, Sendai, etc.
Another favorite was Yosuke Ashida geometric train designs:
He filmed trains at Shinjuku Station for 6 minutes, printed them, cut them out and then made the above design. A closeup:
Ping Magazine has a great interview with Richie Hawtin:
A lot of what we do with Minus stems from my kind of experiments with sounds, like what I did with the Plastikman albums. When working with sound, and as my songs don’t contain too much information, I kind of visualise them and place them in a three-dimensional space. For me, to fully understand how these sounds interact physically or in these virtual spaces is to go and see another artist’s representation: standing in front of a Rothko or walking around a sculpture of Serra, go towards his huge pieces of metal and get the weight of the situation. That enables me sometimes to formulate a musical idea. It’s a way connecting to our sonic expression…
Full interview is here
Hawtin also talks about collaborating with visual artist Ali Demirel, who mostly does the VJing and video work for Hawtin and his label minus, and blew the crowd away at Metamorphose this weekend. See some of Demirel’s work here.
Special Bonus, Richie Hawtin documentary:
I first heard of Kogoro Kurata through his steampunk laptop. Now the guy is making massive armed robots and this giant hand you see here. If his scale continues to grow at this rate, plan on Godzilla’s new nemesis by next summer.
All links through the venerable Engadget
Sunday’s Japan Times had a feature on the awesome rice field paintings we wrote about a few months ago.
Apparently, time is running out to see them in full detail because:
…now in August, the lengths of each kind of rice are different due to their different growth rates. Now, we cannot clearly see the drops falling off the waves, as the yellow rice for the drops is shorter than Tsugaru Roman. So by now the drops have begun sinking into the green background of the Tsugaru Roman.”
A great collection of time lapse clips from the PinK Tentacle .
I have always really loved these simple, yet expressive Stop Motion Studies from David Crawford.
In David’s own words:
“It is said that 90% of human communication is non-verbal. In these photographs, the body language of the subjects becomes the basic syntax for a series of animations exploring movement, gesture, and algorithmic montage. Many sequences document a person’s reaction to being photographed by a stranger. Some smile, others snarl, still others perform. Some pretend not to notice. Underneath all of this are assumptions and unknowns unique to each situation.”
I just saw Joelle Bitton’s “Abstract” installation at Gallery Ef in Asakusa. Pretty cool stuff. The gallery itself is in a 140-year old warehouse that’s been converted into a cafe/bar up front with a small gallery in back. You walk through the cafe and then down a step, then crouch through an Edo-era doorway (maybe comes up to my waist. There in this old, darkened room is a white carpet on the floor and a digital recorder directed at…you.
I don’t know the details, but somehow it films you and then projects your form onto the carpet, with a constantly-changing palette of nature scenes, squiggly lines, and the like. I forgot my camera, so these pics come from Gallery Ef’s site. It’s quite cool, and I LOVE the building itself, but it’s hard for me to say “Drop everything and go” because this is it: one very cool interactive piece int the back of a cool cafe. If you are in Asakusa, tho, this is a must.
Vuk Cosic made these video game-inspired flags. Man, I gotta renew my passport. And does this mean my kids will have citizenship (and bonus points) in both Nipong AND AmericaInvaderz?
PingMag has an interesting piece on the two Ukiyo-e exhibits presently on display in Tokyo. Both deal with Ukiyo-e’s connection with ghosts, Yokai and other spooky/surreal elements.
The venerable art/design e-rag, Ping Mag, is plugging a really interesting event at POINT gallery in Ebisu.
I’m gonna head down and check out the punk yukata on sale and maybe snack on some food creations. You should, too.
It goes through the weekend: Saturday, (Aug 18) from 16:00-24:00 and Sunday (Aug 19) from 15:00-22:00
A map here
I know Hyungkoo Lee’s Bugs Bunny bones and other cartoon skeletons have already made a lap or two around the net, but after seeing the Kazuo Oga exhibit, it made me wonder about what some of Miyazaki’s characters would look like. I mean, Totoro is a fat bastard, right? What’s holding up all that girth?
If you’ve seen a Miyazaki film (Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, etc), then you’ve probably seen the work of Kazuo Oga, who as Miyazaki’s creative director, was responsible for all the background scenery. The Oga exhibit at the MOT has room after room of Oga’s paintings, sketches and anime cells, and it says something that you can take out the characters from the scenes still be stunning. A few examples:
The paintings are cool, but my favorite part was on the 2nd floor – Oga’s paint-splattered desk was here, along with examples of the cell-making process. Then there’s several video loops of scenes from films with the original background framed alongside. Four or five glass celles were used to create the forest in the opening chase sequence of Princess Mononoke (around minute 4:30).
The exhibit is awesome, but it’s way too crowded right now. I left last Saturday because of the 90-minute wait, then returned near opening time Sunday morning to a 40-minute wait. I thought it’d be packed with kids since it’s school holidays, but the majority were adults. It makes sense, though: everyone in their 20’s or 30’s grew up watching Miyazaki.
I had a couple four-year olds in tow, however, and they got bored fast (They didn’t see the payoff of waiting in a line for forty minutes and then NOT see a movie. “Where’s Totoro?” they kept asking. They were dumbstruck when I said “Right up here. But he’s sleeping, so be quiet.” Sure enough, they had created a 3-D replica of Totoro’s lair, complete with sleeping Totoro, whose chest heaved as he slumbered. Classic.
I’ll stop harping on Cai Guo-Qiang’s exhibit at Shiseido Gallery now that the show is over, but I just found this video on his site, which is the best example I’ve seen of the process he goes through for his most recent gunpowder paintings. Click the number next to “Video” to watch.
Only 2 days left to check out Yoshiyuki Mitsuzumi’s bizarre and beautiful ceramic sculptures. He morphs all the naughty bits of the body to create new animals, complete with small museum-like panels describing their habitats.
This is one of the better exhibits I’ve seen at The Vanilla Gallery in Ginza. They specialize in erotic/fetish art, and some exhibits have had amazing work, but more often than not it’s WAY too rough or creepy for my taste. Mitsuzumi’s sculptures, however are gentle – even friendly.
Me like…
Seriously, if you haven’t seen Cai Guo-Ciang’s Gun Powder paintings at the Shiseido Gallery, you have four days before it closes on August 12th.
Cai is amazing. No surprise China tapped him to be one of the visual directors for the Beijing Olympics. He’s created some incredible (and arguably dubious) installations using wolves:
and tigers:
But I like his firework-based stuff best. Check out this “Black Rainbow” piece he’s done in Spain and Scotland:
Some homemade vid:
He “paints” with gunpowder, too, brushing and piling it onto massive canvases. Then he covers it all with stencils, cardboard and bricks and lights it. The colors he gets – deep sulphurous ocres, hearty chocolates, stark charcoals – are truly incredible at this scale.
This video shows Cai at work. Wait for it: the good stuff doesn’t happen till the last 5 seconds:
PingMag is running an interesting interview with 21_21 Design Sight director Naoto Fukasawa.
I wonder why they’re running it so late. I mean, they mostly talk about the awesome Chocolate show they just put on, but the exhibit closed last weekend. Hmm.
This is the only vid I got of the bizarre mummies-on-stilts I saw wandering around. If that wasn’t weird enough, they were being led around by some sort of sci-fi traffic controllers with blue LED flashlights:
The Palace or Wonder area has always been my favorite part of the festival. I’ll add more details later, but here’s what your confronted with upon entry:
Giant sculptures made out of scrap metal, trees made out of mufflers, freaks of all stripes and usually some kind of carnival act that revolves around pain and/or danger. This year it was the “Globe of Death”
That’s THREE motorcycles in there. Great cheap thrills. And if that wasn’t enough, the bottom opens up. I caught it as it closed.
Just a few days left to see the Chocolate exhibit at 21_21 Design sight.
It’s great, but it’s no chocolate jesus
Tokyo Art Beat page
The 21_21 site
More info
Someone took some video
Tom Waits has a chocolate jesus, too.
And don’t forget, 6-time Grammy-winners,
Sexual Chocolate
Japanese farmers in the town of Inakadate Aomori Prefecture create some amazing crop art in their rice fields. The works should be visible until harvest in September.
http://www.am.askanet.ne.jp/~tugaru/z-inakadate.htm
Link via Pink Tentacle
The Red Box events are a great example of where club culture and art collide. Carlos Gibbs, the guy behind Deep House Project and Red Box, pulls together killer DJs, VJs, painters, photographers, sculptors, etc and throws them all in a room for the evening, with the image of a Red Box as the common thread (add your own symbolism here).
HYPTYO faves, Rimpa Eshidan were there, too (you may know them from their intro to Youtube Japan.). I wondered how they would translate their sped-up painting exercises into a live performance. So what did they do? Red Boxes, of course. BIG ones:
These rotated throughout the evening, taking on different images and patterns. Great stuff. Only problem was this jackass wanted to perform with them.
Everyone tried to avoid the guy (he started hugging people), but it was unavoidable that someone got house paint on their clothes. Myself included (and on my favorite shirt, dammit). Once they got under control, the painting continued:
none
Korehiko Hino paints portraits of himself and others with these swollen bug-eyes and blank expressions, like a muppet after the hand is removed. They’re large canvases, too - bodies probably 2x actual size.
noneWhere would art be without them?
Not all of Suwa’s paintings deal with them, but some of the best do. His portraitsare a mix of Caravagio and gothic novel.
I’ve recently discovered the painter Atsushi Suwa . His hyper-realistic oil paintings are jaw-droppingly gorgeous, creepy or both. I stumbled upon a recent exhibition while looking for different gallery, but it was somewhat serendipitous, as I planned to see an exhibit of photographs of the famed butoh dancer, Kazuo Ohno. The Suwa exhibit? A larger-than life painting of Ohno sleeping. Ohno is now over 100 years old, and Suwa captures every wrinkle, liver spot and and shiny drop of saliva.
