Tag: Japanese art
Yayoi Kusama: She always knew she’d be famous
Wednesday, October 16th, 2024 Blog,One morning last year in New York City, a queue formed at the entrance to the David Zwirner Gallery. As the day progressed, the line grew longer and longer, until it extended around the block. The occasion was the opening of a commercial exhibition by Yayoi Kusama, and the chance to spend 30 seconds in […]
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine
Friday, August 23rd, 2024 Art Column,In a career of 50 years, Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948) has worked to quietly and purposefully refute the idea that photography is a “second-class citizen” in the world of art. Although known as a photographic artist, Sugimoto is a polymath, with interests in science, history, philosophy, theatre, architecture and landscape design. He has been a […]
Cutting Through Time: Cressida Campbell, Margaret Preston and the Japanese Print
Sunday, June 2nd, 2024 Art Column,Cutting Through Time is an artful title for an innovative exhibition at the Geelong Art Gallery that explores affinities between Cressida Campbell, Margaret Preston, and the great Japanese printmakers of the Ukiyo-e school. It’s yet another instance in which a Victorian gallery is surveying the work of artists firmly associated with Sydney. At the opening, […]
Makoto Azuma
Friday, February 16th, 2024 Blog,Makoto Azuma is the Indiana Jones of florists. He has fired flowers into the stratosphere and plunged them to the bottom of the ocean. One of his favourite tactics is to preserve specimens at their moment of maximum beauty, in blocks of clear resin, which is how visitors to this year’s NGV Triennial at the […]
Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles
Tuesday, June 28th, 2022 Art Column,Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles, at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art, is a daring but necessary exhibition for an Australian art museum. Daring, because local audiences have grown so accustomed to a diet of ‘masterpiece’ shows it’s difficult to imagine them flocking to see the work of a contemporary Japanese artist whose name will be […]
Kusama: Infinity
Friday, June 18th, 2021 Journals,Kusama: Infinity has echoes of “Eternity”, that word inscribed in chalk on surfaces all over Sydney for 35 years, by the eccentric Arthur Stace. It took Martin Sharp to make Stace into a cult figure when he reproduced that distinctive cursive script on a poster, but Yayoi Kusama has been a one-woman cult since she […]
Newsletter 314
Monday, November 25th, 2019 Newsletter,Sydney felt a bit like Beijing last week with grey smoke from the bushfires hanging in the air. The difference, so I’m told, is that the air quality in Beijing is a lot better nowadays as the government have quietly but prudently responded to growing public unrest. It takes a lot to rouse the Chinese […]
Japan Supernatural
Friday, November 22nd, 2019 Art Column,Directors’ forewords in exhibition catalogues are usually perfunctory affairs but there was one line in Michael Brand’s comments in the Japan Supernatural volume that caught my eye. It was surprising to find the Art Gallery of NSW director thanking Louise Neri of Gagosian Gallery, New York, for accompanying him on a first visit to Takashi Murakami’s […]
Japan Supernatural: A First Look
Saturday, November 2nd, 2019 Blog,Curators will often describe an exhibition as a labour of love, but Japan Supernatural is more like a labour of fun. Melanie Eastburn has enjoyed working on the show for about a year-and-a-half, but has been carrying the idea around for much, much longer. Over the past few decades the Japanese fascination with ghosts, demons […]
Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale 2018
Friday, August 17th, 2018 Art Column,It’s often said that the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale could only happen in Japan. In terms of sheer scale it is the largest contemporary exhibition in the world, spread across 760 square kms of the mountainous regions of Niigata prefecture. This year is the seventh incarnation of a project intended to help revitalise an area that […]