The Pola Research Institute of Beauty & Culture is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, and as part of this, the Pola Museum of Art has organized an ambitious exhibition that aims to present a cross-disciplinary view of art, product design and women’s fashion of 19th- and early 20th-century France. ...
In 1995, the multitalented Kyoichi Tsuzuki created a gorgeous, encyclopaedic book that visually documented the messy apartments of creative friends and acquaintances. The photography was beautiful, though Tsuzuki did not at the time consider himself a photographer, or have aspirations to be called an ...
When global creative agency UltraSuperNew was thinking up a way to involve its client Heineken beer in a promotional campaign, it decided to throw a monthlong party. “There aren’t that many rave parties or block parties in Tokyo right now,” says UltraSuperNew digital producer ...
The Shokado Garden Art Museum in a suburban Kyoto neighborhood offers a respite to visitors with its distinct seasonal variations of flora as well as recreated tea ceremony houses, calligraphy works and brush paintings — all associated with medieval Japanese Buddhist monk Shokado Shojo. ...
In 1954-55, three Kyoto ceramists of the Sodeisha group of artists began a revolution by creating objects that fulfilled no practical role. Kazuo Yagi, Osamu Suzuki and Hikaru Yamada took away the mouths of vases or added several more to them, played with vessels’ ...
We are only a month or so away from the Rio Olympics. While the world will soon be focused on that, in Japan many will also be thinking four years ahead to the Tokyo Olympics. It is easy, then, to see why the Tokyo ...
A group of craftsmen working in a more than 400-year-old metalworking tradition in central Japan have dived into the world of anime as a way to survive the decline of their industry and boost their own sense of fulfillment as artisans. At an event ...
Seven decades of art history; one masterpiece for every year, each created by a different artist from France or closely connected with the country; and all from the collection of an iconic Paris art institution — that’s the premise of the current exhibition at ...
Old chewing gum, cheap carpet sticky from spilled drinks, sagging seats pitted with cigarette burns: Satoshi Chuma’s photographs of old cinemas on show at the National Film Center are fantastically evocative of the decline and fall of celluloid. Having spent several years working in ...
Attending a protest is not the only way to gain understanding about the postwar reality of U.S. bases in the southern island prefecture of Okinawa. A museum adjacent to a key U.S. base has become an unlikely place where lessons about the roots of ...
A sketchbook of drawings by Dutch post-impressionist master Vincent Van Gogh has been discovered and will be published in November, the French publisher Seuil announced Thursday. “This sketchbook was known only to the owners, myself and the publisher,” Seuil official Bernard Comment said, calling ...
It’s been a few years since the last big Pierre-Auguste Renoir exhibition in town. The last one, if I remember correctly, was “Renoir: Tradition & Innovation” at the National Art Center Tokyo (NACT). That brought over the French impressionist’s “Dance at Bougival” (1883), an ...
Hajime Sawatari is 76 and alone. He’s technically still married, but found that photography and chasing skirt didn’t sit well with being in a monogamous relationship. “I want to be free to photograph what I want. I’m very self-centered,” he tells me, disarmingly. In ...
