A first look at the new Yayoi Kusama retrospective that just opened today at the Tate  in London. So much great work, all in one place! Wish I was in London to go see this.

Source: @Tate

Tadaaki Kuwayama, Untitled (1992/2012) anodized aluminum, 22 elements, each 8 x 8 x 2 1/4 inches. © Tadaaki Kuwayama, courtesy Gary Snyder Gallery, New York

I’m intrigued by the minimalist work of artist Tadaaki Kuwayama, who is currently showing at Gary Snyder Gallery in Chelsea (NY). The gallery is configured around 2 main site-specific works, a wall piece and a floor piece. Both are super minimal works sculpted from anodized aluminum and titanium. The basic color of the floor piece is pink, but there’s something about the metal that causes these green-gold interference colors to appear depending on the angle of the light and where you’re standing in relation to the piece. It’s really beautiful!

What i think most inspires me is that the artist – at age 80 – is still experimenting with materials (this is his first attempt at working with titanium)! Perhaps his success lies precisely in that insatiable curiosity, that irrepressible desire to know, no matter what the material. It’s artists like this, with an inextinguishable, undaunted appetite for learning and experience, that will define the future.

Tadaaki Kuwayama, Untitled (1992/2012) metallic paint on Bakelite mounted to aluminum, 8 elements, each 23 5/8 x 23 5/8 x 2 3/8 inches. © Tadaaki Kuwayama, courtesy Gary Snyder Gallery, New York

Tadaaki Kuwayama, Untitled (2012) anodized titanium, 8 elements, each 11 3/4 x 23 5/8 x 5/16 inches. © Tadaaki Kuwayama, courtesy Gary Snyder Gallery, New York

Tadaaki Kuwayama, Untitled (2012) anodized titanium, 8 elements, each 11 3/4 x 23 5/8 x 5/16 inches. © Tadaaki Kuwayama, courtesy Gary Snyder Gallery, New York

The show is on display through February 25, 2012. Do go check it out if you’re around.

For 9 years the artist Satoshi Hirose collected the plastic bottle caps from the bottles he had consumed. His latest sculpture, currently on view at Galleria Maria Grazia Del Prete in Rome, represents his 9 years of existence through a sculpture of those bottle caps that resembles an island or, in my case, a heaping mound of garbage. The day-to-day accumulation of everyday materials are contrasted with the pictures of everyday activities that hang on the wall, immediately forcing the visitor to reflect on the life cycle.

Hirose’s work is on display at GMDP through March 24, 2012.

source: @azito_art

I’m fascinated by these photographs of bones, taken by photographer Eiji Yuzawa. And while wholly involved in the subject matter of death, the photos are hardly morose. Instead, there is a fantastic sculptural quality to the works that is both calming and satisfying. I find myself most attracted to the abstract forms.

Yuzawa began photographing bones in 2006 and compiled a photobook that was released last year. His work has now been released – in what appears to be the next logical step for all fine art these days – as a series of iphone cases.

Yasuhiro Suzuki has a penchant for re-envisioning the ordinary as extraordinary

I’ve had a long-time art crush on Yasuhiro Suzuki, a young artist (32) who has a penchant for re-envisioning the ordinary as extraordinary. His subject matter is often banal – a traditional toy, a zipper or a tree stump. In the most literal sense, Yasuhiro Suzuki is devoted to the design of daily life.

So I was excited to hear he had a new book out covering some of his recent works. Blinking and Flapping encompasses works that were on display at Suzuki’s major retrospective, which took place late last year at the Hamamatsu Museum of Art.

The gorgeous book is now on sale through Amazon Japan (2,625 yen) – they ship overseas!

Here are a few of my favorite projects from the retrospective last year:
(click images to enlarge)
Apple Kendama
In this playful and somewhat nostalgic piece, the traditional kendama toy gets a makeover with a bright red apple.

Ginkaku-ji Chocolate
The “Temple of the Silver Pavilion” gets a silver wrapping and a sweet filling.

Talk about good taste!

Blinking Clock (left) and Bucket Stump (right)

Spoon Sand Watch

A poetic timepiece that replaces the hourglass with a kitchen utensil.

Blinking Leaves
An installation of leaves with open and closed eyes printed on the front and back. They blink as they flutter down. Magical!

Ship of the zipper
This is my absolute favorite piece. Suzuki created a boat-shaped zipper based on a model he had done back in 2004. The waves it created as it drove across the inland sea created the teeth of the zipper. How cool is that!? I bet Moses never thought of using a zipper to part the sea. (be sure to check out the video below)

Big cities can be an isolating, coldhearted sort of place where loneliness engulfs you like dry heat. But not for 29-year old photographer Sohei Yoshino, whose work is currently on display at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, along with other up-and-coming photographers. Yoshino’s Diorama Maps, as he calls them, are highly personal recreations of cities that he has visited. Yoshino spends months walking the city streets, taking black-and-white photographs with his 35 mm camera. From his hundreds of contact sheets he cuts out the photos – often as many as 10,000 – to create elaborate 3D collages.

These are my personal memories of a city. The photographs I take and the way I assemble them are influenced by what I personally experienced: what I saw, whom I met and even what I ate

- Nishino in a recent interview

But for Yoshino the process doesn’t end with the collage. Because he wants the viewer to experience his pieces as photographs, he trims them evenly and the reshoots them with a digital camera. Fascinating! I highly encourage you to click the images to enlarge them.

Contemporary Japanese Photography vol.10 elan photographic runs until January 29, 2012.

“Diorama Map New York” (February – July 2006) | click to enlarge

“Diorama Map Paris” (May 2007 – November 2008) | click to enlarge

“Diorama Map Rio de Janeiro” (March – June 2011) | click to enlarge

all images courtesy Sohei Yoshino
source: Japan Times

Artist and sculptor Tadashi Kawamata has a brand new installation at kamel mennour gallery in Paris. Chaotic slabs of wood hang above the courtyard creating a  somewhat unsettling ceiling that blots out the sky. The disturbing pagoda continues throughout the gallery’s 3 ground-floor spaces, swelling and swaying, instilling tension and nervousness in the atmosphere. It’s no coincidence that visitors may recall footage of debris floating on the surface of the ocean after being swept away by the 3/11 tsunami, only to realize that their world has now been flipped upside down; they are staring up at the debris from under the water.

Affected by the catastrophes that have wreaked havoc in Japan this year, the artist has conceived of his structure as a motionless and deadly wave, in a reference to all those bits of broken wood carried along by the receding tsunami, which saturated the ocean surface with their sheer quantity.

The installation is on display at kamel mennour through January 29, 2012.

Source:@azito_art

Miyamura establishes himself as a solo artist with a series of tranquil prints that harken back to the glorious days of the abstract expressionists

Calligraphy artist Gen Miyamura has been experimenting with Bokusho (墨象) – an avante-garde form of calligraphy that sprung out of post-war Japan – for quite some time now. The artist is perhaps better known for his collaborations with designers like Shun Kawakami (here and here), rather than for his standalone work. But in an exhibition that just opened at ICN Gallery in London, Miyamura breaks free from that mold, establishing himself as a solo artist with a series of tranquil prints that harken back to the glorious days of the abstract expressionists. I really adore the brush strokes and how they make us aware of the presence of the artist.

The exhibition at ICN Gallery runs through February 22, 2012.

the artist and his work

All photos from installation view at ICN Gallery | all photos by Joe Keating

“Functioning is not merely the function of things, but also their mystery.”
- Jean Baudrillard

I don’t always understand the cerebral postmodernist commentary that comes out of French social theorist Jean Baudrillard’s mouth. But for some reason the above quote makes complete sense to me. We’re surrounded by tons of objects wherever we go, and we interact with them on a daily basis, forming relationships with many of them. But the significant relationships are created not by the object dictating its function, but rather by us, the user, engaging with the object and defining the function. From ambiguous forms rise curiosity and inquisition, thus inviting personal and subjective interpretation.

Canada-based designer Miya Kondo created these “Objects of Empathy,” a symbolic representation of an ideal relationship to objects. The sculptural forms are simple, stoic and beautiful, yet they are wholly ambiguous. With no agenda of their own they present themselves as malleable sponges, ready to be defined by the user.

Source: hitspaper | Miya Kondo

Combining astronomy and good eats sounds too good to be true. But in their celestial collection of planetary chocolates, chocolatier L’éclat of the Righa Royal Hotel Japan have done just that. The chocolaty solar system includes Mercury (coconut mango), Venus (cream lemon), Earth (cacao), Mars (orange praline), Jupiter (vanilla), Saturn (rum raisin), Uranus (milk tea) and Neptune (capuccino) – sorry, pluto is no longer considered a planet.

Each are sold individually (400 yen) but if you order the set (3,800 yen) they’ll throw in the Sun – a flaring delicacy of criollo chocolate and pineapple. You can order online (3,200 yen; Sun not included)or you can use a forwarding service.

But if meteorites are more your thing, they’ve got a collection of those as well, featuring 8 chocolates modeled after major meteorites that have been discovered around the world.

(thanks for the tip masako!)
source: ufunk | L’éclat