Contributed by Kenneth Greiner / On a recent trip to Japan, I visited Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art. Behind the museum’s massive burnt orange Torii gate, in the Higashiyama Cube, is its special exhibition, “Nihonga Avant-Garde: Kyoto 1948–1970” which, in the cube’s labyrinthine interior, encompasses three of Kyoto’s significant 20th-century avant-garde art movements (Pan Real, Cella Art Association, and the Sozo Bijutsu), propelled by a disaffection with traditional Nihonga painting.
Tag: Japan
Spencer Finch’s inventive visual translations
Contributed by David Carrier / Spencer Finch is fascinated by Japan, which he first visited some 50 years ago, when he was a teenager. “One Hundred Famous Views of New York City (After Hiroshige),” his current exhibition at James Cohan Gallery, includes four installations grounded in that experience. Fourteen Stones, inspired by a Japanese Zen garden and made with ordinary concrete bricks, encompasses simulacra of fifteenth-century garden stones. Even these banal objects, Finch suggests, warrant contemplation. For Moonlight (Reflected in a Pond), he has installed stained glass to evoke Japanese moon-viewing. Four LED sculptures present images that recast traditional Japanese haikus through lit color schemes. And Finch’s 42 watercolors reference Utagawa Hiroshige’s renowned One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, made in 1856–58, through present-day New York.




























