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 Andrew Conti

“Welcome, Welcome” Art-Beijing-Contemporary

Voices from contemporary China arrive in Tokyo

Zhang Dongliang, What Are You Searching For?, 40x40cm (set of nine canvases), oil on canvas Photos courtesy of Base Gallery

Headlines with trumpeted phrases like “sweeping changes,” “dramatic increase,” and “impressive economic growth” fill business newspapers, Internet sites, and television news programs about China. Yet with increasing numbers of celebrated architectural projects and events like Shanghai’s 2004 biennial, such attention-grabbing slogans are frequently appearing in the media of the art world as well. The burgeoning contemporary art scene of the Middle Kingdom has arrived.

Ji Dachun, Crying, 110x110cm, acrylic and pencil on canvas

Riding this outburst of impressive work, Kayabacho’s Base Gallery offers a glimpse at four painters from throughout China. These artists—all of whom are under 40—struggle with the changing face and shifting culture of China and its emerging political, economic and cultural power. The result is a diverse group of paintings that speak to the possibilities of art liberated from the constraints of an enforced ideology or singular mode of creativity.

Among the many compelling images in the show, the large gestural vision Li Songsong employs in Welcome, Welcome immediately pulls the viewer in. This image of students standing at attention with right arms raised conjures up the socialist realist pictures of Mao’s China. But these children are not rigidly crafted icons vehemently waving little red books; They are sensually re-imagined snapshots of history rendered in a din of spills, gestures and drips. Songsong situates the viewer behind these children as they face forward to a hazy white emptiness, perhaps the empty canvas of China’s future.

Ji Dachun’s series of iconic human/animal amalgams speak of comic books, anime and a child-like fantasy. One piece, Untitled, shows a wildly tactile creature composed of a rubbery paint sniffing a dandelion in the canvas’s center, while Crying features a small stuffed animal rabbit crying into a white puddle. Dachun’s work mixes commercial character cuteness with roughly worked grounds and a keen calligraphic impulse to create works with an ironically humorous edge.

Li Songsong, Garden, 130x320cm, oil on canvas

Greeting visitors at the door, What Are You Searching For? is Zhang Dongliang’s golden grid of nine canvases upon which figures of solitary men peer, squint and stumble in a farcical search for elusive somethings in the mustardy blankness of the ground.

An understated humor is also apparent in the preternaturally ordered The Ferris Wheel by Qiu Xiaofei. In this large-scale work, a tank, a jet and a leopard hang precariously from a rusty and unfinished Ferris wheel that rolls across a coppery sky in a roughly broken jut. The leopard seems ready to pounce forward and take flight as its young rider stares off in the other direction as if in reflection of his uncertain and uncanny surroundings.

Welcome, Welcome, 180x320cm, oil on canvas

In no way a strictly Chinese phenomenon on the outside of the contemporary scene, the works of these artists speak with an outlook and reach that is decidedly global. Welcome, Welcome serves as a brief but satisfying introduction to compelling artist representatives of a culture in transit and on the rise.

The few works in this aptly titled exhibition spark a desire to see more of contemporary China’s unique visionaries and creators at work. A desire soon to be fulfilled in spades as the coming year promises even more exhibitions bringing the hottest artists of China to the museums and galleries of Tokyo.

Base Gallery, until March 25. See exhibition listings for details.

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