Category Archives: museums

The Kaleidoscopic Eye

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Collecting Kaleidoscopes

T gets into these collection manias. Like when she wanted to collect all the Starbucks city mugs. She actually never got around to buying any because at the time, we didn’t have a home, much less a cupboard spacious enough to accommodate a global mug set.

These days, she’s really been into kaleidoscopes. She thought it’d be cool to collect different ones from around the world. Again, she hasn’t actually gotten around to collecting them yet, mostly because the really good ones are really expensive. But that’s T, enthusiastic about life, but not so much that she wants to be burdened by acquiring and storing it.

So it’s not surprising that T wanted to check out an art exhibit titled, The Kaleidoscopic Eye, at the Mori Art Museum. Although we both knew that there wouldn’t be any actual kaleidoscopes, we dig that modern art so we went.

Grapes and Alcohol

It’s a private collection with a theme of “perception and consciousness”, which is kind of a lazy way of saying, “yeah, there really is no theme.” I mean most art purports to address the issues of perception and consciousness.  It’s like having a wine tasting party and having the theme as “grapes and alcohol”.

There were some modern art celebrities represented, like a Tracy Emin neon work. We also enjoyed the mesmerizing film of Tibetan monks debating what existence is. A room full of disco balls that could have been a scene from MTV Cribs certainly tweaked my sense of perception. And a water fountain that had trace amounts of LSD, with venus flytraps hanging above it, certainly could have tweaked my consciousness.

Doorways into Perception

My favorite pieces were archways. One was a hypnotic passageway of lightbubs that flickered in various patterns, pictured above.   This piece by Carsten Holler (spelled with an umlaut over the ‘o’) was magnified by mirrors surrounding it.  And the silk gate by Suh Do-Ho, was especially lovely. The gate was a hand-stitched model of the gate of her childhood home.  It emanated a soft celadon light.

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The exhibit will run through July 5. The great thing about the Mori Art Museum is that it’s open late most nights, and the ticket price includes access to the Skywalk, which is the best view in Tokyo.

Jeju Notes: Off-Season Meanderings

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ocean view


As I mentioned in my previous post, T and I went to Jeju Island last month and I thought I’d type out some of my notes from the trip.

Jeju is Korea’s biggest island. Its oval shape is like an egg off the peninsula’s southern coast. In the middle there’s Mt. Halla, the volcano that created the whole thing. The climate is sub-tropical, but the landscape looked to me like a well-watered Southern California, with palm trees and gentle hills.

Jeju is Korea’s favorite destination for honeymooners, so there are several love and sex museums or parks, lots of romantic photo opportunities, and tons of symbols for marriage. We didn’t go to any of those museums though.

The island also has 3 natural UNESCO World Heritage Sites: Mt. Halla, some cavernous lava tube caves, and a picturesque small crown-peaked island attached to Jeju by a thin strip of land. Sadly, we didn’t go to any of these either.

So what did we do? Here are a few places we visited.

The Garden
We went to the Yeomiji Gardens, which had a gargantuan greenhouse in the shape of a sunflower. Each ‘petal’ housed different themes of plants. My favorite was the fruit tree room.

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In the middle of the glass flower, you can go up to a ‘stamen’ tower and get great views of the surroundings.  And outside there were well-manicured English, Italian, Japanese and Korean gardens.

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The Teddy Bear Museum
Nearby, we were pleasantly surprised by the Teddy Bear Museum. We thought it was too cheesy to enter, but they had a restaurant in there, and we were gagging for some coffee that didn’t come in a can from a vending machine.

The museum was awesome in a cheeky, self-referential way. For one thing, architecturally, the conical glass structure is quite contemporary. And the whole thing is located at the head of a canyon that empties into the sea.

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You can learn the history of the teddy bear. There were antique bears, some over 200 years old. And there were contemporary creations like this Shin Ramyun bear.  Our favorite section had teddy bear representations of famous art, like this iconic Klimt painting.

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The Sculpture Park
As lovers of sculpture and art we had to go to the sculpture park. It’s much bigger than the Hakone Outdoor Museum, with many more pieces. But it doesn’t have any internationally famous artists represented. Instead, it’s probably the most complete cross-section of Korean sculptors assembled anywhere.

Since this park is a bit remote, there were probably fewer than 10 visitors including us. It was like a scene from the movie Spirited Away, an eerily deserted amusement park. Except it wasn’t creepy. It was just empty, which was nice because we basically had the whole place to ourselves.

After strolling through all the paths and checking out the art, we settled onto the expansive lawn and sketched some of our favorite pieces.

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The African Art Museum
Inexplicably, there’s a museum of African art. We had so many questions about this museum. For instance, how did it end up here? Was it a rich benefactor with a love of African art? Or was it some governmental exchange that subsidized it? And what about the performers that played percussion and danced for visitors 3 times a day? What’s their story?

The Museum itself is a replica of the Djenne Mosque.  Inside there were several galleries of photographs, tons of masks, and other traditional ritual paraphernalia.  

fake Djenne Mosque

For the full set of pictures click here.

Arranging Leaves at the Setagaya Art Museum

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his and her mosaic thrones

In the previous post, I wrote about a shot I took at the Setagaya Art Museum. Just the path to get to this museum is cool. It’s a pedestrian walkway lined with artificial streams and miniature bridges for kids to play around. There’s also lots of generous seating like the his and hers mosaic thrones above.

The museum itself is in a huge park that used to be a golf course. This suburban museum also has a nice blend of architectural elements, like the serpentine organicism of Gaudi, and the tight geometric texturing of Frank Lloyd Wright.  For more pictures click here.

British Artists

The special exhibit at the museum was an overview of British art called, Twelve Travels, and consisted of 12 British artists, ranging from the venerable JMW Turner to the trendy and always enjoyable David Hockney. Many of the works were done in Japan, so that was a loose unifying theme. There wasn’t much in the way of my favorite sculptor, Henry Moore, but there were many of his sketches which I’d never seen before.

Two other artists made strong impressions on me. The first was Anthony Green who painted whimsical scenes of suburban British life in distorted perspectives on unconventionally shaped canvasses. His paintings were colorful, detailed, and was satisfying like eye comfort food.  I couldn’t find the pieces that I saw at the museum.  But the painting below is quite representative of his style.

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The other artist, now probably my favorite artist at the moment, is Andy Goldsworthy who grew up outside of Leeds. He uses natural found objects in the outdoors and arranges them, then takes photographs of the pieces at the moment light hits them perfectly. A movement called land art has arisen from his influence.  They are ‘installations’ in nature.  The pieces are ephemeral since they are made of natural materials and left to the elements.ag-rivergoldsworthy-boulder.3

Wet autumn leaves are arranged by color gradient on rocks in streams. Or are woven together with twigs. Or the twigs are delicately constructed like a web. It’s the perfect art form, with the most beautiful, available and ecological of media, nature.

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Here’s an interview with Andy Goldsworthy.

While searching for Goldsworthy pictures I came across another artist who practices land art. I really like his stuff as well.

And finally, here’s a clip from a BBC documentary about him. 

Mezzotints and Post-Apocalyptic Art

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Yozo Hamaguchi is a mezzotint artist. It was my first exposure to this art form and from what I gathered, it’s a metal printing method that fades colors. The pieces are still lifes, ethereal, simple, minimalistic.

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Subjects include lemon halves lit up next to a darkened wine bottle silhouette. Or a glowing darning needle plunged into a subdued multicolored ball of yarn. The colors fade in and out, transitioning from dark to slivers of light. The pieces are small, so they need a patient eye, willing to pick up subtleties.

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Downstairs there were some other print artists. I wasn’t terribly impressed with most of them, but I was struck by the lithographs of Hisaharu Motoda. His compositions were of famous Tokyo landmarks in a post-human decay. Busy Shibuya Station’s Hachiko crossing was deserted and over-run with weeds, trees and leaf litter. Vines grew up Tokyo Tower. Glamorous Ginza was reduced to rubble. The line details and the subject matter could have been disturbing, but viewing nature retake human edifice was therapeutic.

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The Musee Hamaguchi Yozo is hard to find and out of the way, for me anyway. And the space is quite small, more the size of a private gallery. There are no other interesting landmarks to visit in the neighborhood. So I don’t know if it was worth it to trek out to this obscure central Tokyo museum.

But the cute receptionist gave me a 200 yen discount for the cafe, and it was a proper cafe experience, with well-crafted joe, and what looked like amazing desserts, which I didn’t try, much to my regret.

I went there because it was one of the museums that I could enter free with my Grutt Pass (a must for any Tokyo museum-goer). But for a print enthusiast, or if you’re in the neighborhood, it’s worth a stop.

The Path to the Narukawa Museum

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Over the Mountains and through the Woods
This is the third in this series of Hakone museums. As so many things, it was the journey that was interesting, not so much the final destination. To get there from our hotel, we took:

  • A train that used switchbacks to go up the mountain, moving its way up in a zig-zag path. So at certain intervals, the train pulled into a dead-end, then reversed into the ascending track.
  • A cable train that went straight up the mountain. There were two trains on one track, connected together by a pulley, and they passed by in the middle to switch places. They worked as counterweights to each other.

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