ARTIFACTS

Since the late 19th century, Japanese art has been schizophrenically split into yoga (Western-style) and nihonga (Japanese-style). The latter arose as a self-conscious response to the inroads of the former. Nevertheless, when nihonga took up the challenge of Western art, it was unable to avoid borrowing some of its ideas, most notably the romantically inflated concept of the “divine” artist. But instead of Michelangelo or van Gogh, nihonga found its role models in the elite artist/craftsmen of the Rinpa school. The Yamatane Museum of Art’s exhibition What Did Nihonga Learn from Rinpa? uses 50 mainly large works to look at echoes of the school in the works of 20th-century nihonga artists. Particularly worth seeing is Kaii Higashiyama’s vast seascape Rising Tide and Gyoshu Hayami’s Falling Camellias. Through Dec 25. See exhibition listings (Ginza/ Kyobashi/ Tokyo) for details. CBL Giveaway! Metropolis is offering readers ten free tickets to “What Did Nihonga Learn from Rinpa?” For your chance to see this excellent exhibition, email the following information by Wednesday, December 17, to editor@metropolis.co.jp: 1. Name; 2. Address; 3. Age; 4. Home country; 5. Last exhibition you visited Include the text “Nihonga” in the subject line. Winners will be selected at random.

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By John McGee

Time of My Life: Art with a Youthful Spirit

Torawao Nakagawa, nothing has started and nothing has been lost, 2003, oil on canvas, collection of the artist

On January 29, 1974, Fumio Nambata fell off a ferry into the Seto Inland Sea and died. The 32 year-old artist left behind more than 2,000 works.

Painter Toshio Arimoto was 38 when he died in 1985.

"Time of My Life" makes an awkward connection between the idiosyncratic paintings these two created in their short lives and a supposedly similar "youthful spirit" found in Japanese artists working today.

Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery's usual set-up is fairly clear-a temporary exhibition of international contemporary art in the high-ceilinged galleries of its first floor, Japanese modernism from the museum's 2,400-piece Terada Collection in the smaller galleries upstairs (emerging artist showcase Project N is also there). Starting this year, however, temporary shows can occupy both floors, as this one does. But to muddy things, work by five of the 11 artists (including Nambata and Arimoto) in "Time of My Life" comes from the Terada Collection.

Nambata's watercolor and ink abstractions combine funky Paul Klee grids with the color and curves of Wassily Kandinsky. In the larger pieces, mostly from the '60s, black lines squiggle and zag across backgrounds of blue circles and pink spritzes, delineating bulbous buildings with lopsided windows and connecting lumpy humanoids into elaborate, dysfunctional mobiles. The later paintings are smaller, darker and blurrier, with ink outlines bleeding under washes of grayed colors.

Hiroshi Sugito, Yoshitomo Nara, Kyoko Murase and Makiko Kudo also employ various naïve styles.

Fumio Nambata, Self-struggling Days, 1961, watercolor and ink on paper, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery collection

Sugito's installation of paintings and sculpture is perhaps the show's highlight. There's a landscape on an oval chunk of wood and a crude white Batman logo that floats off the wall, exposing its purple supports. Simple, imperfect parabolas drift across several paintings that range in size from paperback petit to Cinemascope wide.

Nara and designer group graf also manipulate scale in their installation of three white wooden houses, S, M, L (2003). In one, the chairs are child-playhouse small. In another the sofa and TV (featuring a slide show) are slightly too big. The third-holding Nara's drawings of bad kiddies-is just right.

Unlike Nara's children, those in Murase's watery paintings seem to sleep. Drifting kelp forests wrap them in broad pink and blue strokes. In Kudo's ill-drawn oils, doe-eyed youngsters inhabit colorful narrative collages of flowers and animals.

Some prefer adults. In Arimoto's predella-sized paintings, lone figures in Renaissance garb do simple tasks, e.g. drawing aside a red curtain or skipping rope on an open plain. Tomoyuki Hotai's wood and bronze figurative sculptures look like studies for statuary on a modern Gothic cathedral. Missing limbs lend a classical air. Katsura Funakoshi is also known for carved wooden figures. Most of his pieces here, however, are large monochrome lithographs and etchings of the same kind of statue-like, forward-facing folks (there's one sculpture).

Kyoko Murase, Grape, 2002, oil on cotton, private collection

The work of the remaining three artists-'70s hippie prints by Yoko Yamamoto (e.g. bearded guys among giant asparagus); graphic paintings of landscape details by Torawo Nakagawa; and kimochi ga warui spit ice cubes and pubic hair beadwork by Yuki Okumura (the youngest artist in the show, b. 1978)-seem only tenuously related to the theme.

There is some good work here. But the exhibition seems less about curatorial concept (though there's naïve, romantic, and sentimental aplenty) than trying too hard to update the relevance of the Terada Collection via association with hip younger artists.

Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery. Also, in Project N, Mioko Nakayama. Both until May 9. Hatsudai stn (Keio New Line), east exit. Tokyo Opera City Tower 3-4F, Nishi Shinjuku 3-20-3, Shinjuku-ku. Tue-Sun noon-8pm. Tel: 03-5353-0756. Adm: Adults ¥800, students ¥600, children ¥400. www.operacity.jp/ag

photo credit: Saito Arata, courtesy of Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery