A Temple of Giants
During the first week of the New Year, the in-laws and I went on a road trip to Chiba, which is just east of Tokyo. The highlight of the trip was a visit to Nihon-ji, which is a Soto Zen temple in the mountains that dates back to 725 AD. [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘art’
January 14, 2010
Traveling Underwater to the Big Stone Buddha
September 27, 2009
Konoike Tomoko: Inter-Traveller
“First off. Get outside. Then go so far away that you start regretting coming to such a spot. Do something really difficult, and somehow or other, make your way back home.”
-Tomoko Konoike
Of all the art exhibits that I visited this summer, Tomoko Konoike’s Konoike Tomoko: Inter-Traveller (sic) was the most compelling, visionary, [...]
September 10, 2009
Stitch by Stitch
My image of fabric art has been clouded by vague impressions of shaggy rug hangings, unsatisfying yarny concoctions, and heaps of twine or rope symbolizing something or other. But that all changed when I went to Stitch by Stitch, an exhibition of Japanese fabric artists at the Teien Art Museum (one of my favorites [...]
August 20, 2009
Mary Blair, Disney’s Muse
Mary Blair was an artist who worked for Walt Disney. This is probably a profound understatement since, after viewing The Colors of Mary Blair at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, I began to see that her art was Disney. In fact, I hadn’t realized that the aesthetic of the 50’s and 60’s, [...]
August 13, 2009
Meditating Wind no. 76: A Tokyo Blind Spot
Earlier this month I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo or MoT. Even though it’s in central Tokyo, it’s quite a bit out of the way, in one of those blind spots far from train or subway stations. The neighborhood, Kiyosumi Shirakawa, is very traditional in a shabby way.
Nevertheless, the walk [...]
