Kabuki Actor Ōtani Oniji III as Yakko Edobei by Tōshūsai Sharaku

Result #1

(Kabuki Vocalist Ōtani), 1987.The large-scale zine also commemorated the life and career of the third president of the Republic of Japan, Toru Iwahara, who died at age 96 in 2001. This show had two sections: a retrospective and an interview. The retrospective opened with a selection of his paper collages, located in his home and a library in Tokyo; these reveal the tremendous influence he exerted on his son, who passed away soon after the zine was published. In the interviews, Iwahara candidly discusses his own interests as a writer, his memory of his father as a scholar and a musician, and his desire to express the emotions of his late father. But his affectations are never exhausted; they continue to improve. The interviews also provide insights into Iwaharas personal life. He talks about his fathers practice of performing sacred Buddhist ceremonies as a shaman. He describes his unusual love of miko-e (Japanese wax paintings), which consist of colorful and fluorescently colored images of animals. He recalls that his father wrote to him: I have become the person who destroys [the] world. . . . I feel that the human race is the most valuable thing in the world.

Result #2

Kabuki Actor Ōtani Oniji III as Yakko Edobei by Tōshūsai Sharaku, 1935, silk screen, 25 1/2 x 19 5/8". © Estate of Tōshūsai Sharaku/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/KW, Paris. In the middle of the 30s, at the end of the decade known as the Golden Age of Japanese art, one of the most eminent artists of the postwar period, Tōshūsai Edō was born. The exhibition at Münster's Galerie Karl Heinrich, Heracasia and the Museum of Modern Art in New York revealed how this young Japanese-American artist took up the tradition of folk and folk art of Okinawa and brought it into dialogue with American art. This rare opportunity was not taken lightly. Eager to engage with Japanese culture, Edōi was eager to undertake the difficult task of making art that would be able to engage the broadest audience.Yet, as with much recent Japanese art, this exhibition was marred by the absence of much of the experimental and experimental that characterized Japanese art at the time. Several works, including Cibachan: From Chinese to Japanese, had already been shown in Paris and New York, and those shows took the form of Edōis introduction to the art world. This might not be surprising, given the fact that Edōis Japanese name is derived from Edōi, the island that is the ancestral place of Okinawa. It is therefore no surprise to discover that his work, as it is now effectively known, was as much about Okinawan culture as it is about the art of the American painter. Though Edōis paintings can be admired for their meticulousness and their innovative juxtaposition of rich color with the flat, three-dimensional surface of the canvas, it is undeniable that this artist had a hand in the creation of many of the things that remain sadly unrecorded by Edōi. It's easy to imagine him introducing at least one groundbreaking work from the past century to the present.

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, 1988, her two-channel video projection Animism. It seems in the case of Edobei to be the case that the easiest way to make a film is to have someone be a puppet.One important piece of documentation is a sixteen-minute live version of Karako Kimihiras Japanese voice-over of a translation of Let the Message Be a Bright One, a novel by the translator Mimi Murao. This is not a completely Japanese-speaking translation—the two authors are native speakers. But it is a translation from a Japanese script. This was part of a video projection to be presented in Japan, but I wonder whether it would be possible to see in such a context. And how would this translation read in Los Angeles? Perhaps a new initiative will be needed in order to show this work in full, or perhaps simply a new techniques will be needed in order to produce an adequate translation of it.

Result #4

Kabuki Actor Ōtani Oniji III as Yakko Edobei by Tōshūsai Sharakui, Japan, 2017. Photo: Yurii Sakakihara. A half decade ago, the Tokyo art scene was dominated by a handful of younger artists from the decades before 2000, but its 2009 numbers are now coming in, thanks to the global wave of upstart contemporary Japanese. At the same time, the presence of such a diverse group of painters suggests that art is not just the domain of the master but, by virtue of its status as a form of contact between the artist and the public, a function of both individual and collective dialogue. This work is, for instance, the work of the artist Akiko Mori, who opened up a space in the city of Osaka for her first solo exhibition in 2016. A graduate of Keihin University, Osaka, and Saitama University in Japan, she is based in Tokyo. Her paintings, which have been shown in Paris, and in Tokyo, are serene and almost melancholic. More than any aesthetic or spiritual inspiration, she draws on a belief in the innate essence of life—in the realization that anything can be taken from anything else—and she has treated that realization as a form of obsession. In her recent exhibition for the artist herself, however, her works became increasingly personal, too. The six paintings and one sculpture displayed in the main gallery, decorated with a single colored plastic curtain, allowed the viewer to see more intimately what was inside—what they have been. Mori drew on a local historical fact, having spent some time in an isolated volcano crater in the countryside near where this landscape meets the coastline of the small Japanese city of Osaka. The event that resulted in this particular act of self-recognition was dramatic, perhaps even irksome, but also involved the paradoxically literal projection of personal memories onto the landscape.

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i (Flowers of the Moon), 1955, and Sokkaäluppaa in Mäan, 1963, a nonnarrative video of sculptures by Lee Ufans family of idols, are an extraordinary collection of documents with an active and confident legacy. To bring the collection into sharp focus and to engage audiences who will be at the forefront of the Moon in 2020, Lees once-outstanding film Beyond: The Organizing, 1972, is being released by Columbia to be mounted in New York later this year. From March 2016 through January 2017, Lees Collection for the Architecture of Culture, curated by Gian Maria Mariani, was staged in the Pompidous Museum of Arts in Paris with more than fifty artists, musicians, writers, and artists from twenty nations. They brought together more than four hundred works in several media—including videos, photographs, sculptures, and installations. Lees collection is not just an object of surprise. It is also a treasure. It will be at the heart of the next global exhibition landscape.