New Art in Japan: Highlights from Art Collaboration Kyoto and Art Week Tokyo

Painting intuitively, with one action leading to the next, Swedish artist Andreas Eriksson creates sublime abstractions that look like giant maps without words. Inspired by the nature surrounding his rural studio, his paintings evolve organically. Communing with paint and canvas in the way one might observe walking through a forest or by a lake, he marks his path with what he sees, internally and externally. 

Presenting five small- and large-scale paintings, two sculptures, and thirteen works on paper in a traditional Japanese house, a tea house, and a Western-style home in his exhibition “Rakuyou” at Kyoto’s Murin-an villa and gardens, Eriksson’s works offered a dialogue with the garden’s splendid nature and an inspirational journey through time and space. The compelling works were created after visiting Kyoto and its meditative environs. A series of related small paintings on wood were simultaneously displayed at the ACK booth of neugerriemschneider, Eriksson’s Berlin-based gallery. 

Image: Installation view of Andreas Eriksson: Rakuyou, Murin-an, Kyoto, October 31 - November 3, 2024.

Internationally acclaimed for paintings, sculptures, and installations using natural materials like wood, rocks, and clay, Bosco Sodi makes everything by hand, which is no small feat when you are exhibiting with eleven different galleries worldwide and have up to nine solo shows a year. The Mexican artist’s gestural paintings made with a mixture of sawdust, pigment, and glue on wood panels, or by painting a monochromatic circle each day on recycled chili sacks, yield minimalistic abstractions, which are cracked like the parched earth or humble and spiritual, like Arte Povera and Gutai Art—two direct influences, along with the Tachisme of Antoni Tàpies, on the artist. 

Born in a coastal area of southwest Japan in 1969, Izumi Kato creates enigmatic figures, which he renders in paint with his hands, sculpts out of wood, stone, vinyl, and plastic, and assembles from painted fabric, chains, strings, and rocks. A colorful cross between sci-fi characters from Japan’s pervasive manga and anime cultures and beings born from the county’s Shinto beliefs, by which mystical spirits are believed to inhabit all things, Kato’s otherworldly creatures connect us to the ancient past while making us wonder what astounding lifeforms the future may spawn. 

Paired in an exhibition of their own making in Kyoto’s historic Ryosokuin Zen Temple and scenic garden, their “Speaking in Silence” show beautifully brought the past into the present and the present into the past.

Image: Installation view of Speaking in Silence, Ryosokuin Zen Temple, Kyoto.

A Brazilian painter best known for his imaginary landscapes, Lucas Arruda paints from memory rather than recording actual places, making his mindscapes meditatively universal and ideally suited for a 700-year-old Japanese Zen Buddhist temple. Painting with a spiritual eye, his intimate canvases fluctuate between seascapes and abstractions, capturing the subtleties of light illuminating nature. 

Presented in the natural light of the temple rooms, the artist’s nine twilight scenes brought to mind J.M.W Turner’s romantic visions of the land and sea and Giorgio Morandi’s metaphysical still lives. His first solo show in Japan and the first exhibition of a Western artist at the temple, the placement of his atmospheric paintings in the tatami-matted rooms, sacred tea room, and recessed temple alcoves (known as tokonomas) made the experience of discovering them an absorbing adventure.

Image: Installation view, Lucas Arruda at Daitoku-ji, Kyoto. Painting: Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023.

Inspired by traditional Buddhist art, Tseng Chien-Ying makes pigments from minerals, shells, coral, and animal glue and appropriates subjects from East Asian religious art and court painting to create contemporary works of art addressing queer sensibilities. Versed in Buddhist and Taoist philosophy, he aims to make the abnormal normal and what might be perceived as bad and ugly as good and beautiful.

His Bromance painting portrays an old monk with a young monk—a tradition of mentoring in Zen Buddhism, but a relationship that could be seen as gay through his depiction of them framed in the two-panel painting like a peach. Other paintings in his solo show pictured hands to symbolize desire and curvilinear forms, suggesting wind, water, and smoke as shapeless elements of nature, while lines strikingly shaped his figurative ceramics.   

Image: Tseng ChienYing, Bromance, 2024. Ink and colors on paper, mineral pigments. Two-panel screen, 135.2 x 105.2 cm x 2.

A Tokyo-based artist who studied landscape gardening before turning to art to explore the relationship between humans and the natural world aesthetically, Taro Shinoda created paintings, hand-built sculptures, and installations inspired by garden designs until he died in 2022 at age 58. At ACK, the gallery presented paintings from his 2020 Katsura series. 

Inspired by the Katsura Imperial Villa and gardens on the outskirts of Kyoto, Shinoda painted architectural elements abstractly like nature. Sizing the linen canvases with rabbit skin glue and employing walnut oil with oil paint as his medium, he created an inner image that curves away from the viewer within the larger rectangle to show the relationship of the place to the universe and art to the ways of living, society, and culture. A painting from the artist’s Katsura series was also part of the curated Art Week Tokyo Focus show.

Image: Taro Shinoda, Katsura 11, 2020. Oil on canvas, 120 × 95 cm.

Presenting 57 international artists, the AWT Focus exhibition explored Asian conceptions of the universe and its cosmic cycles. Curated by Mami Kataoka, director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, “Earth, Wind, and Fire: Visions of the Future from Asia” surveyed Japanese contemporary art in relation to new practices in Asia and beyond. The exhibition was divided into four sections addressing the themes of: cosmic structures; hand, body, and prayer; invisible forces; and natural cycles and ecosystems. 

Standout artists and artworks included: Mexican artist Jose Dávila’s abstract painting with semicircular and concentric motifs appropriated from art historical sources and his hanging sculpture that incorporated an iconic Acapulco Chair frame with two suspended rocks maintaining its balance; Japanese Mono-ha artist Kishio Suga’s sculptural wall works that leave wood and metal in a raw state; Indonesian puppet master Heri Dono’s paintings depicting traditional monster puppet characters to address current social concerns; and French conceptual artist Laurent Grasso’s enigmatic landscape paintings and recent film that reference a mythological past to present a sci-fi vision of the future.

Image: Installation view of AWT Focus, “Earth, Wind, and Fire: Visions of the Future from Asia,” curated by Mami Kataoka, at the Okura Museum of Art, Tokyo, 2024. Pictured: Shigeo Toya, Mass of Folds III, 2015, in foreground; Thomas Ruff, d.o.pe.07 III, 2022 at left; Jose Dávila, A Secret Wish, 2023, at center; and Jose Dávila, The fact of constantly returning to the same point or situation, from The fact of constantly returning to the same point or situation, 2021, at right. 

Since the early 2000s, Ryoko Aoki has been a critical player in Kyoto’s experimental art scene. She makes intimate abstract and figurative drawings reflecting moments in her life and constructs assemblages and installations incorporating them and other evocative objects. Her third solo show with the gallery, entitled “Stories About Boundaries,” presents works that use the form of the box and boxes within boxes to define boundaries through architectural space. A series of boxes on tables and shelves presents curated selections of her drawings and natural objects like rocks, shells, minerals, leaves, and dollhouse-size objects. 

These poetic arrangements are complemented by Aoki’s precisely placed wall drawings, which appear to be psychological studies and diagrammatic doodles, and a large floor installation that uses drawings, blank paper, and rocks to make a larger drawing with distinct spatial boundaries. Taken as a whole, or gesamtkunstwerk, the entire gallery becomes another kind of box, where the viewer is ironically contained by the boundaries created by Aoki’s purposeful exhibition design. One of her intricate box pieces was also on view in the curated AWT Focus show.

Image: Ryoko Aoki, Bold About Scale, 2024. Watercolor on paper, paper clay, stone, wood, aluminum foil, sweater, and cardboard box, 40 x 49.8 x 5.5 cm.

Blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture and craft and fine art, Arlene Shechet works in various media and with diverse techniques to construct eye-catching 2D and 3D pieces. Mixing carved and painted pieces of wood with ceramics and metalwork, Shechet labors intuitively to assemble contrasting parts into a captivating work of art. 

Beyond Belief, her first solo show in Japan at Pace’s newly opened space, offers an overview of the New York artist’s diverse ways of working—ranging from early monochromatic mandalas created with handmade Abaca paper and jacquard tapestries with hand embroidery to dynamically textured glazed ceramics mounted on steel bases and painted wood sculptures, like Speaking of Drawing, a whimsical totemic piece. A vibrant red abstract ceramic sculpture from her Together series, exploring how art and color provide visual and spiritual nourishment during times of crisis (Shechet began the series in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic), is also featured in the curated AWT Focus show. 

 Image: Arlene Shechet, Speaking of Drawing, 2022 Painted hardwood and painted plywood, 80" × 33" × 22" (203.2 cm × 83.8 cm × 55.9 cm).

A former student of Yoshitomo Nara, Hiroshi Sugito was trained in the traditional Japanese painting style known as Nihonga, which utilizes ground pigments made of natural materials such as minerals, shells, and coral applied to handmade paper. Sugito, however, achieved a similar effect in his paintings by using layers of acrylic paint. A younger member of a group of Japanese artists who emerged in the early 1990s as a bridge between fine art and pop culture, the Nagoya-based artist has exhibited with Tomio Koyama Gallery and internationally since 1996. 

His current solo show at the gallery’s new space in Tokyo’s Kyōbashi district presents a selection of earlier paintings of trees, houses, people, clouds, and fruit rendered in a childlike manner, alongside a playful assortment of resin and polystyrene foam sculptures of apples and lemons and colorfully painted, wall-displayed cardboard boxes. 

Image: Installation view, Hiroshi Sugito: apples and lemon, Tomio Koyama Gallery Kyobashi.

One of Japan’s most influential artists, Yoshitomo Nara uses subjects associated with comics and animation to explore issues of isolation and urban angst. Inspired by punk rock and manga, Nara is feted for his drawings of knife-wielding girls, menacing dogs, and houses on fire, which drolly express societal feelings of helplessness and rage. His wide-eyed, devilish characters have infiltrated international pop culture through his art, countless publications, and consumer products, gaining the artist a cult status amongst an ever-growing number of fans. 

Nara’s ninth show at the gallery presents new paintings, drawings, and ceramics produced over the past summer. The paintings, some with words and phrases in Japanese and English expressing Nara’s ideas and emotions, were created on found wood panels. In contrast, the drawings, made with industrial paint sticks used in construction, were created in a remote village in Hokkaido. Rounding out the exhibition was a series of small-scale ceramic fruits and vegetables, clouds, and a tiny Mt. Fuji with jovial faces—signifying life is good, at least for the moment. 

Image: Yoshitomo Nara, A Face Appeared under the Lake II, 2024. Sakura Solid Marker solidified paint stick on paper, 49 1/8 x 37 1/4 x 1 7/8 in. framed (124.9 x 94.5 x 4.7 cm). 

A widely exhibited and internationally collected Japanese video and performance artist, Meiro Koizumi is best known for his works addressing complex social and political issues with a focus on the psychological aspects of human behavior. His show at MUJIN-TO Production’s former factory space offers new assemblage sculptures—a recent pursuit—that question the relationship between humans and technology, with the fear that we are headed to a dystopia. 

His mixed media sculptures, which merge bodies with furniture and machines, reference such art historical figures as Francisco Goya and Joseph Beuys and current events like the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, while his small-scale paint-altered photographic works on the surrounding walls took images from a 100-year-old Japanese book on the art of hypnotism as their eerie point of departure.

Image: Meiro Koizumi, Raize, 2024. Mixed media, 212 x 108 x 142 cm.

With master’s degrees in painting and photography, Yutaka Nozawa has found a fascinating way to put the two mediums in dialogue in his most recent works. For his new series Canvas Canvas, which makes up the bulk of his solo show, the Shizuoka-born and based Japanese artist created diptychs consisting of a photograph and a nearly identical painting. 

Beginning by placing a bare white canvas in a select setting, Nozawa paints the scene, replaces the blank canvas with the one just painted, and then photographs it in the same setting. Printing the color photograph the same size as the painting and presenting them side-by-side, he constructs a surreal scenario intersecting time and space.

Image: Yutaka Nozawa, Canvas Canvas 23, 2024. Oil on canvas, C print, 33.3 x 22 cm each.