On the way to the Belgian painting exhibit I happened upon the best single piece of art I’ve seen in many years. But I’ll have to get to that in my next art post. In the meantime, you’ll have to be content with my new favorite Belgian painter, and several exciting Japanese contemporary artists. Continue reading
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. The first thing you notice while driving around this area is that it’s warmer than Tokyo. There are palm trees and flowers still in bloom. So even as we hiked around the mountain, it felt like we were just strolling through a city park. Continue reading
“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, and delightful. Today was the last day of this exhibit. As usual, my timing is impeccably bad, but you’ll be able to see her latest exhibit, Twelve Wolf Poets, at my favorite sculpture park, the Hakone Open Air Museum, from October 9.
Konoike flexes her artistic versatility in a multi-room exhibition that reads like a fairy tale adventure. There are delicate paintings on paper doors, animation videos, sculpture made of all kinds of materials, mosaics, murals, paintings, light designs, and even furniture.
Two animated videos were projected on books as if the books came to life. One was a creation mythology and the other was an Odyssey of Mimeo, a haunting faceless childlike character. Mimeo is an innocent wanderer, often traveling with a six-legged wolf. The wolf acts as a totem, along with streams of flying daggers, and also a bee girl. These motifs recur throughout the exhibit.
The path through the rooms/worlds mirrors the creation myth journey of Mimeo. Often, the transition between these rooms required the viewer to pass through low curtained entrances, change levels, or enter darkness.
In the first room, which was veiled in white, there was a massive winged figure with dragonfly wings, that’s perhaps giving birth. A pair of legs stuck out of what can only be described as a vaginal opening. The bare child’s legs had on a pair of sneakers, and this image can be seen throughout the works. There was even a pair of the same disembodied legs sitting on a bench in the museum lobby.
The second room was red. It had four large panels on each wall. To enter this room you had to pass through a low red curtained entrance. The paintings were vivid and spectacular.
Another room was an installation with a surreal dioramic landscape. There was an enormous revolving baby head surfaced with broken mosaic mirror shards. Around it was a shipwrecked boat, a miniature mountain and flittering winged creatures overhead. Sooo cool.
I thoroughly enjoyed the imaginative presentation of the art, and appreciated the integration of all the pieces into one interactive cohesive journey. It was as if I walked through a fantastical theatre performance.
“Don’t sit there gazing at a painting…get outside and feel the wind. Don’t mutter the lines of some old poem, get moving and create some friction. If you don’t keep playing, traveling all around and causing all kinds of friction, until you’re so tired you can’t speak, you’ll never stoke the fires of a robust imagination.”
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 in Tokyo).
For starters, I saw that the use of fabric could be as incomprehensible as any of the finest in abstract impressionism. That pieces of clothing could be so laden with decoration that it would firmly cross over from fashion into art, like the ominous bejeweled cape that was in a dimly lit room. Or that it could literally envelop the viewer in sheer bright red curtains of knotted lace. Continue reading
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, in art, advertising, design, as well as animation, were all shaped by her unique use of colors and stylized shapes.
Not only did she do a lot of the conceptual art for many of Disney’s biggest films, her influence extends to current films like the anthropomorphized Cars. Blair was also the mind behind the iconic It’s a Small World attraction, my favorite ride to deconstruct.
Her works extend way beyond Disney. She was a critically acclaimed artist before joining Mickey’s team, and made several attempts to leave and blaze her own trail. But women artists were (and still are) not taken seriously, so she returned to what seems to be a supportive boss in Walt Disney.
I wonder how she would have been received had her work not been identified with the ultimate in commercialized art. Yet, it’s doubtful she would have wielded the same influence had she been merely freelancing.
The exhibit is a comprehensive retrospective of her works, from her post-art nouveau student days to her Disney years to her bizarre surreal paintings before her death. I appreciated the way she researched her subjects, even traveling to South America to get ideas for a film.
I have to admit, I was dismissive when T suggested going to the exhibit, because of my love/hate relationship with Disney. But I was set straight with a good herstory lesson and educated about an important and influential mid-century artist.
