Kohei Sekigawa, figure / out Guardian Garden; 11 January to 27 January Meticulously rendered observational drawing carries a certain appreciative respect in the same way that finely carved figurative marble sculptures do. The attention to detail and focused labour required to execute them well is of an Olympian order, so the residue energies of that … Continue reading
Jud Wimhurst, Gimme Freedom (or Gimme Death) Bendigo Art Gallery; 5 November, 2016 to 12 February 2017 Nostalgia isn’t always the referential craning back for a better time. It isn’t always rose-coloured glasses and halcyon days. Sometimes, the fun-time good-times of the days of yore are dark hearts inside fluffy clouds, where clowns reveal the … Continue reading
Tetsuro Kano, a tree as a city Yuka Tsuruno Gallery; 21 January to 25 February Architectural miniatures constructed by sentient caterpillars and art-fan hummingbirds with a penchant for mid-century Calder mobiles furnish much of the Yuka Tsuruno Gallery in T-Art Complex, Tokyo. Set out over two spaces, the exhibition can be roughly categorised into three … Continue reading
Reijiro Wada | Ariel Schlesinger SCAI The Bathhouse; 27 January to 25 February Eight artworks occupy a square gallery space, set out in iambic rhythm, delivering poetry in materials and ideas. Brass, polished steel and glass sit in equilibrious partnership with brandy, citric acid and bone. Time is both accelerated and accumulated in meditations on … Continue reading
Tomohiro Kano and Yoshiaki Kojiro, (joint exhibition untitled) Gallery Tokyo + Beijing Tokyo Art Projects; 21 January to 18 February Totemic structures sit evenly spaced on the white-tiled floor of a nondescript space on the seventh-floor of an office building in Ginza. Some twenty-four pieces, most of them on flat and polished steel plates, are … Continue reading
Ryunosuke Goji & Issei Yamagata, optical camouflage Youboko Art Space, Tokyo; 21 January to 29 January Featuring video, print, sculpture, digital image and found objects, this punchy show by artists Ryunosuke Goji and Issei Yamagata works like a complex codex dissected into planar fragments and laid bare across a domestic space to entrap and enchant … Continue reading
Fiona Amundsen, Arsenal of Democracy Tokyo Wonder Site, Hongo, Tokyo; 14 January to 12 February It’s hard not to hear the echo of the adage, ‘if we do not learn from history we are condemned to repeat it’, when viewing the memorable and memorialising work of Fiona Amundsen. Featuring two poignant video works of a … Continue reading
ob, Lights Shimmering Between Realms Kaikai Kiki Gallery, Tokyo; 20 January to 23 February Young, wide-eyed women stand in soft landscapes like ethereal marker points in the paintings of an artist called ‘ob’. An ambient soundscape set the mood of the show, performed lived by Ai Kamano and Kazuki Sugawara, and also worked as the … Continue reading
Gentaro Ishizuka, Demarcation Gallery 916, Tokyo; 20 January to 26 March At the risk of sounding like every cliched art wet dream, I took an elevated train ride at night through the downtown skyscrapers of Tokyo to the harbour district of Minato-ku in search of a cavernous exhibition space on the sixth floor of what … Continue reading
Yukari Bunya, Works 2010-2016 Gallery Jin Projects, 3331 Arts Chiyoda, Tokyo; 20 January to 12 February Explosive fragmentations of occupied architectural boundaries spill across planar surfaces. High octane momentum is captured in an apparent occlusion of both time-lapse elongation and freeze-frame immediacy. Artist Yukari Bunya manages to channel futurism, axonometrics and intuition in her wonderful … Continue reading
