EXHIBITION
Exhibition2024
-
- Current
DXP2 (Digital Transformation Planet2)
2024.3.2(Sat.) - 2024.3.24(Sun.)
“DXP (Digital Transformation Planet): Towards the Next Interface,” which was on display since October 2023, was scheduled to run through March 2024, but the Noto Peninsula earthquake that occurred on January 1 caused some damage to the exhibition galleries, with some glass panels falling from the ceiling. As a result, the exhibition had to be canceled. In response to this situation, we are developing “DXP2” by taking advantage of digital technology, mainly in the Public Zone. This is one of our proposals for curatorial resilience — that is, the capacity for overcoming this difficult situation — in museums. With developments and changes in technology that are updated daily, the relationships between technology and our bodies, our daily lives, and our environment, including all living things, are also being generated anew. In this world, the digital is no longer an extrinsic tool, but our neighbor, partner, and part of our bodies. DXP’s messages come from a variety of perspectives, not only from artists, but also architects, designers, scientists, and programmers, spanning food, clothing, and shelter. Several artists will exhibit new versions of their work in response to DXP2. Together with the exhibition’s companion publication, “Digital Bites: How to Ingest Art & Technology” (BNN, Inc, 2024), we hope that visitors to the exhibition will find a tasty dose of digital to feed their new ideas and activities.
… -
- Past
【cancelled】Collection Exhibition 2:Electricity-Sound
2023.11.18(Sat.) - 2024.5.12(Sun.)
Today, we live with all kinds of sounds, from natural environmental sounds to man-made electronic ones. Sound has the power to connect us to the world not only through the mere act of hearing/listening, but also through our bodily senses. In the museum’s collection, works with a deep relationship to sound are inseparable from electricity, which is both a natural phenomenon and an element of energy. This is because electricity is essential to the recording and reproduction of sound. Therefore, this exhibition will focus on both sound and electricity and the relationship between them, and train our ear, so to speak, to the electrical connections that emanate from these works. The exhibition will also explore trends in art where invisible sounds have been transformed into traces, drawings, electrical signals, and data. The process of giving form to sound and the methodologies by which it is transformed are closely related to the evolution of sound reproduction technologies such as recorders and players, and their development promises to highlight issues related to contemporary ar t in general, such as recording and reproduction, and preservation and restoration. Through these themes, this exhibition introduces works from the collection that are not merely sound art, but also relate to a wide range of fields such as science and philosophy, and which unfold visually and acoustically. Takagi Yuu (Assistant Curator)
… -
- Past
That Which Bears the Supreme Name of Chocolate
2023.10.28(Sat.) - 2023.11.3(Fri.)
Event Overview Although Kanazawans are often thought to have a fondness for tea ceremony and Japanese sweets, the rate of chocolate consumption in the city is among the highest in Japan. In recent years, due in part to the emergence of young chocolatiers who are producing highly distinctive chocolate, Kanazawa’s food culture has assumed even greater depth. Through displays of crafts related to chocolate, a food that is beloved by people throughout the world, curator-guided gallery tours with sign-language interpretation, and other events, this exhibition, That Which Bears the Supreme Name of Chocolate, conveys the charms of Kanazawa, the Town of Chocolate. Exhibition Summary The scientific name for the cacao tree, Theobroma cacao (named by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus) is derived from a Greek word meaning “food of the gods.” Cacao, which originated in the highlands of Central and South America, can be traced back to the Mayans, who flourished in Guatemala prior to the Common Era, and the Aztecs, who inhabited what is today Mexico. Cacao was so valuable that it boosted the status of money. Later, in the 17th century during the Age of Exploration, cacao was introduced to Europe by the Spanish, and gradually took hold as a luxury item and nutritional drink among court nobles and the social elite. Cacao was combined with sugar, cinnamon, vanilla, and other ingredients to make chocolate, which came to be seen as a nec plus ultra (“nothing further beyond”). This led to greater availability, from the upper classes to common people, and in the modern era, chocolate grew even more widespread, making it a beloved food among people all over the world. In this exhibition, we examine the introduction of cacao as seen in rare books and documents from Japanese collections, and while tracing the history and culture of the seed’s acceptance, we also showcase works of contemporary art related to chocolate and crafts that bear a resemble to chocolate. We are also pleased to present the works of Stéphane Leroux, who uses unique techniques to incorporate chocolate into his artistic creations, for the first time in Kanazawa. Chocolate is available in a diverse array of types, enabling us to choose the variety we want based on our individual taste. It is a valued gift that brings joy both to the giver and to the receiver. Chocolate provides us with an opportunity to give something special and also to take part in a form of contemporary gift giving. Kurosawa Hiromi Chief Curator The 38th National Cultural Festival The 23rd National Art and Cultural Festival for Persons with Disabilities Ishikawa Hyakumangoku Cultural Festival 2023 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa Special Exhibition
… -
- Past
【cancelld】DXP (Digital Transformation Planet): Towards the Next Interface
2023.10.7(Sat.) - 2024.3.17(Sun.)
Eating the digital!? Technology that integrates with the body How will digital technology change our way of life and sensibilities? This question has been asked repeatedly since the 20th century. In 2023, we may answer this question: a completely different planet is about to emerge. On this planet which has entered the Anthropocene, we are immersed in an invisible network. Our lives are partly (and getting more and more) controlled by AI, and the relationship between technology and life is being generated anew every day. DXP is an exhibition/interface that brings together artists, architects, scientists, programmers, and others to capture this transformation across disciplines, understand what is happening now, and propose it as something that can be sensed. The contemporary realities of AI, metaverse, and big data are the technologies of the moment. DXP is a vision of the future that follows it, explores the possibility of a comprehensive way of life that includes food, clothes, and habitation. Yuko Hasegawa, Yuu Takagi, Mio Harada, Yishu Hang, Jin Motohashi
… -
- Past
Alex Da Corte Fresh Hell
2023.4.29(Sat.) - 2023.9.18(Mon.)
Today, life’s every nook and cranny is saturated with visually appealing images. Creators and inventors are constantly thinking about what kinds of images operate on the human psyche and how to visualize the things that normally go unseen: emotions, time, and space. Alex Da Corte is an artist known for works that play with objects and icons that feel familiar to him, deconstructing and reconstructing their original meanings. He draws inspiration from a variety of sources, including popular and consumer culture, art history and design, sampling the visual culture of America through a variety of media including video, sculpture, painting, and installation. In all of his methods, Da Corte’s attention to vivid color and form is evident, and familiar motifs become dense, graceful assemblages thanks to his extensive knowledge of art history and his subtle and distinctive sensibility. While these works have an allure that draws people in, they also appeal to inexpressible human emotions such as loneliness and anxiety, making people dance in a strange, delusional world outside of the realm of rational organization. This is the first exhibition for Alex Da Corte at an art museum in Asia, and will feature a total of 11 video installations and other works, including recent and never-before-seen pieces. The varied images projected on an overwhelmingly large box-shaped screen frequently appear light, coquettish, and funny, but they also possess a consistently mysterious appeal that plays havoc with one’s mind the more deeply one engages with them. “Fresh Hell” also ventures into the relationship between desire, memory, and perception that has come to define consumer culture in a contemporary society faced with an onslaught of visual information, confronting us with the question of what this inundation of images brings about.
… -
- Past
Collection Exhibition 1 It knows : When Forms Become Mind
2023.4.8(Sat.) - 2023.11.5(Sun.)
As a universal theme relating to our ability to perceive and interpret the world, the relationship between form and mind has been explored in art since ancient times. Gregory Bateson, the multidisciplinary scientist who continuously explored the ecology of mind and nature, described a “mind” as a large network that makes connections among interrelated forms and shapes and their respective patterns. Visible and invisible patterns of various kinds – natural, social, verbal, subconscious – arise everywhere in the world. In the course of daily life, we get a sense of mental systems greater than the individual mind, emerging naturally from relationships among forms and typologies. These patterns and structures are part of a larger network of exchanges and connections that underpin the earth and its ecosystem, and serve as the background for the way we interpret and interact with the world. Art, the history of which is still ongoing, engages with this grand theme by exploring how shapes and patterns shape our perception and understanding of the world, and how they connect to what we might call “mind.” By juxtaposing works from the museum’s diverse collection of painting, sculpture, photography, video, and installation from the 1960s to the present day with works by artists invited for this exhibition, this show takes viewers on a journey through the process of the mind that grasps relationships among diverse forms.
… -
- Past
Collection Exhibition 2 Sea Lane – Connecting to the Islands
2022.11.3(Thu.) - 2023.3.19(Sun.)
In conjunction with the 50th anniversary of Okinawa’s reversion from the U.S. to Japan, it is with great pleasure that we present Sea Lane - Connecting to the Islands, an exhibition focusing on the characteristically insular nature of the Okinawa region in which we examine contemporary art of the Ryukyu Islands as well as the works of artists from Southeast Asia and Oceania – areas that have historically interacted with Okinawa via the sea. Since ancient times, the sea has been a “wall” that separated one island and the next while also being a “road” between them. At one time, the Ryukyu Kingdom engaged in trade with regions such as present-day Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, making it a waypoint for the flow of civilization and a meeting place for a variety of people and goods. In tracing the marine history of Okinawa and surrounding countries, we find that the islands engaged in abundant exchanges with these regions while on occasion coming up against harsh conditions. The more people moved around, the more apparent the linguistic, ethnic, ancestral, cultural, sexual, and philosophical differences between them became. Under these circumstances, artists took a hard look at the realities they saw and responded accordingly. In this exhibition, we present works by seven artists from the museum collection and three others who were invited to participate in this project. These contemporary expressions are rooted both in the unique culture of Okinawa, Southeast Asia, and Oceania, and the irrefutable history of the region. Moreover, the works urge us to consider the diversity that has emerged from the islands, the influence of other regions based on the historical context of the sea, and the relationship between the islands, separated as they are by water, and the people who inhabit them. ●List of works / description
… -
- Past
The Timeless Imagination of Yves Klein: Uncertainty and the Immateriality
2022.10.1(Sat.) - 2023.3.5(Sun.)
Yves Klein is known as the artist of the blue, well known for his deep and vivid renderings of this color that seem to pull the viewer into it: International Klein Blue (IKB). He emerged from the tabula rasa [blank slate] of the devastated postwar period as an artist in search of a new humanity like some sort of comet. When Klein was 20 years old, he spent time on the beach in Nice with the poet Claude Pascal and the sculptor Arman, and the three of them came up with the idea of “dividing the world.” Klein wanted the blue sky, and the episode where he was said to have claimed the sky and its infinite expanse as a work of art by signing his name across it demonstrates his interest in immateriality, the freedom of the spirit, leaping into space, and a cosmic imagination. Through his actions and performances, Klein used colors such as blue, which he considered to be the most immaterial and spiritual, fire, water, and air, so that art could be experienced through sensibility, rather than being perceived just as a material object. As a young man, Klein came to Japan and earned a black belt in judo, and is known for his exploration of the relationship between the spirit and the body. During the same period, the Italian Spatialism movement, Zero from Germany, and Gutai in Japan gained momentum with their experimental attempts at art that rose from the ruins, reexamining the relationship between the human body, material, and space from scratch. This exhibition, centered on Yves Klein while also including artists from these movements that were active around the same period as well as contemporary artists, will highlight the theme of immateriality that is common to their art. Amid the current confusion caused by a myriad of unseen things, such as climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the information environment of the internet, we find ourselves in a state of uncertainty where the substance of things remains opaque to us. As such, Klein’s explorations of a sensibility and spirituality produced by immateriality inspires the creation of contemporary artists, including those of the post-internet generation. This exhibition promises to give us a sense of joy and the strength to feel and imagine that which is not here and now, and to overcome the uncertain present.
… -
- Past
Special Exhibition : Olafur Eliasson
2022.7.23(Sat.) - 2022.9.11(Sun.)
Since the early 1990s, Olafur Eliasson has pursued a diverse practice that includes photography, sculpture, drawing, installation, design, and architecture. He has gained international renown for his endeavors to realize a sustainable world through art. This exhibition presents The exploration of the center of the sun, a work emerging from Eliasson’s interest in ecology and renewable energy, for the first time since the museum acquired it. The work consists of a glass-covered polyhedron and a photovoltaic unit (solar panels and a power supply system with storage batteries, etc.) A light source is mounted in the center of the work, and a light at the end of an arm protruding from the light source rotates slowly, illuminating the room as if the glass polyhedron, suspended in a fixed position in the center of the room, were rotating. The light from the glass polyhedron, to which are attached glittering polarizing filters developed by Studio Olafur Eliasson, projects a galaxy of reflections throughout the room that captivate viewers and immerse them in the world of the work. These movements of light evoke the relationship between the sun, the indispensable source of life, and the planets that orbit it, as well as our orientation toward the structures and laws that make our world’s existence possible. This work, powered by electrical energy generated by solar panels installed in the light courtyard, encourages us to reconsider traditional historical views of progress and new perspectives on sustainable development as we face drastic and irreversible changes in the global environment. We hope that this exhibition will encourage viewers to examine the role of art in an ecological context, while enjoying new and magical perceptual experiences created by a polyhedral compound and reflections of light.
… -
- Past
A collaborative exhibition of works from the collection of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa and National Crafts Museum
Forms of Hitogata
2022.7.23(Sat.) - 2022.9.11(Sun.)
Imagine a work with a human form, measuring some 40 centimeters in height, right there in front of you. Is it a “doll”? Or is it a “sculpture”? And assuming the work is pottery, does that make it ceramic art? How would you feel if it was life size? When dealing with works depicting human forms, it is not unusual to ask yourself questions such as these, related to size, material, and method. However, the question of whether or not these concerns are important in the appreciation of such works is a difficult one. Looking at these hitogata (three-dimensional depictions of the human form) made by Kitagawa Hiroto (b. 1967), whose ceramic works are based on images of contemporary young people, and Nakamura Shinkyo, whose highly romantic works make use of the traditional Hakata ningyo doll-making technique, provides us with an opportunity to reconsider “crafts” and “fine art.” KARASAWA Masahiro, Guest Curator Director of National Crafts Museum
… -
- Past
Collection Exhibition 1 Vessels
2022.5.21(Sat.) - 2022.10.16(Sun.)
This exhibition will focus on the theme of utsuwa (vessels) in contemporary art, drawing mainly on works from the museum’s collection including those newly acquired in fiscal 2021. The word utsuwa has a wide range of implications, from containers with specific functions, to utensils of various kinds, to people’s tolerance and generosity, indicating the importance of the concept in both practical and conceptual terms. Looking back over the history of vessels, Japan’s prehistoric Jōmon pottery was highly prized especially in collective living environments such as villages, and was used for everyday purposes such as storing gathered nuts, plants, and animals and cooking food. At the same time, many of these pieces of pottery feature vibrant ornamentation and patterns that seem to represent the ancient rhythms of life, and they are recognized not only for their practicality but also for their extraordinary decorative qualities. It is easy to see that vessels, which have served people in daily life and religious faith since ancient times, have played vital roles in connecting the human and the natural world, both as everyday items and as sacred implements indispensable for rituals and ceremonies. The human body, too, is sometimes referred to as the vessel of the soul, based on the idea that in the cycle of reincarnation, the soul endures and is repeatedly transferred into a new body-as-vessel with each rebirth. If we think of the body as a vessel, we can see an image of the soul residing in that vessel connecting with the natural world and the realm of the sacred through the body’s five senses, and the body as the vehicle for sensations that awaken memories from long ago. By examining utsuwa, so central to our lives, from various angles, this exhibition seeks to provide an opportunity to ponder their meaning and value.
… -
- Past
Special Exhibition : Matthew Barney
2022.5.21(Sat.) - 2022.9.11(Sun.)
Matthew Barney is one of the world’s leading artists, embodying the 21st century with his endeavors to fuse physical and virtual-data sensation through intimately related sculpture and film practices. He has fascinated the contemporary art world since the 1980s with sculptures, films, performances, and works that integrate these media. This exhibition primarily focuses on Drawing Restraint 9, the ninth work in the Drawing Restraint series which Barney launched in the late 1980s and which consists of films, drawings, and sculptures, along with related works that introduce the narrative, motifs, and characters of the series. As a new installment in the Drawing Restraint series, Drawing Restraint 9 had its world premiere at Barney’s first major solo exhibition in Japan, held at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa in 2005. The work, which conveys Japanese cultural themes from whaling to the tea ceremony, unfolds in a variety of media including film, sculptural installation, and photography. Shot mainly in Japan, the film presents a distinct visual interpretation of Japanese culture. Icelandic musician Björk composed music for the film and the exhibition installation, and subsequent international tour. As the title suggests, Drawing Restraint constrains the body during the act of drawing, and grapples with the unpredictable markmaking and forms that emerge from such restraints. Even 17 years after its release, the message contained in the work, which addresses issues of the human body and the world around it, the activity inside and outside the body, resonates as powerfully as ever with viewers today.
… -
- Past
MOON Kyungwon and JEON Joonho: News from Nowhere
2022.5.3(Tue.) - 2022.9.4(Sun.)
Since leading contemporary Korean artist unit Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho was formed in 2009, they have developed their project “News from Nowhere”(the title of which was inspired by William Morris’ novel), which asks the question, “what are the social functions and roles of art in the contemporary world?” At the same time, they have also been advocating for practical platforms for collaboration through dialogue and the exchange of ideas with professionals in various fields. Based on this approach, Moon and Jeon identify various issues in contemporary society, extracting the issues facing contemporary society and posing messages for us who live in the present to ponder through their works. Today, we are forced to recognize that the calamities that have afflicted mankind since ancient times, such as epidemics and wars, continue to exist as powerful threats. In this unsettled time, their works enable the audience to appreciate how Moon and Jeon, as artists living in the present, perceive a world fraught with threats, distortions, contradictions, and oppression, and what kind of change they are aiming for. Each of the works exhibited in the architectural space of the museum stands alone while being somehow interconnected, creating a multilayered world of artworks. We hope you will enjoy their first large-scale solo exhibition in Japan.
… -
- Past
Kacchu Anatomy: The aesthetics of design and engineering
2022.5.3(Tue.) - 2022.7.10(Sun.)
From the Sengoku through Edo periods, Japanese armor “Kacchu” developed and evolved as a symbol of a samurai’s pride and strength in battle in a unique way. This development occurred in terms of both the aesthetic that deployed these craft skills and innovative designs seen in lacquering, metalwork, and braiding, as well as the functionality and engineering of these items as protective gear. These fascinating aspects will be exhibited in a space designed by contemporary artists. Through a video installation by Rhizomatiks, which digitally analyzes the details and structure of these items, and the spatial design by Nile Koetting, which connects armor to the reality of the modern human body in a flexible way, armor “Kacchu” begins to speak to us in the present tense.
… -
- Past
Collection Exhibition 2: BLUE
2021.11.20(Sat.) - 2022.5.8(Sun.)
in the visible light spectrum, while long red light waves advance in a straight line, shorter blue ones disperse in all directions, dissolving into the space. As symbolized by the ungraspable likes of sky and water, the color blue is perceived in terms of its depth, and for this reason has aroused feelings of longing and adoration since ancient times. Shifting our gaze to land, we find blue to be a highly unusual color in nature, lapis lazuli for example being prized in both East and West. And just as film director Derek Jarman once described blue as “darkness made visible,” blue is also a color that appears in the interval between light and dark, life and death. As we now turn increasingly inward, blue could also be described as the color that most speaks to our souls. This exhibition presents myriad manifestations of the color blue by artists from different countries and cultures, focusing on the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa collection and encompassing a wide range of genres from painting and sculpture, to craft and film. We are confident it will also shed new light on works on permanent exhibit at the Museum such as Leandro Erlich’s The Swimming Pool, James Turrell’s Blue Planet Sky, and Anish Kapoor’s L’Origine du monde. Also on display will be work by our guest artist for the exhibition: painter and film artist Takashi Ishida, creator of distinctive drawing animations striking in their use of blue coloring and light. Come experience for yourself the myriad tapestries of blue woven by a fascinating and diverse lineup of artist.
… -
- Past
Countermeasures Against Awkward Discourses : From the Perspective of Third Wave Feminism
2021.10.16 (Sat.) -
2022.3.13 (Sun.) *Title and contents of the exhibition are subject to change.In this exhibition our guest curator, the artist NAGASHIMA Yurie, looks at works (including her own) produced by ten artists whose careers began in the 1990s, and offers fresh interpretations of these works from a feminist viewpoint. Nagashima has been producing photographic work and writing since her own art-scene debut in 1993, all the while harboring doubts about the “onnanoko shashin” (girl photography) label sweepingly applied to her and other female photographers of the same generation. Uneasy with the joking images of feminists propagated by the media in the 1980s, the young Nagashima declined to identify as a feminist herself, yet became a consistent challenger of male-centered values. Nagashima sees this kind of attitudee, which had the effect of rendering feminist practice among the younger generation virtually invisible, as one version of Japanese third wave feminism, and asserts that elements of it can also be found in the output of artists who declined to be part of any “movement” or pursuit of “solidarity.” This exhibition showcases works selected following dialogue between Nagashima and the nine other artists, based on this observation. We hope the diverse offerings in “Countermeasures Against Awkward Discourses,” will give viewers a taste of the great breadth of art practice that can emerge in response to the situations that confront us.
… -
- Past
FEMINISMS
2021.10.16 (Sat.) -
2022.3.13 (Sun.) *Title and contents of the exhibition are subject to change.Feminism in Japan from the 1990s onward was linked to popular culture, focused on girls and young women in Europe and the US, and was disseminated through the media. Young women’s activities in Japan were also featured in the media, particularly a brand of feminism that became known as the “Girly Movement.” However, in Japan’s case it cannot be denied that in some ways the movement was less a call for change than it was fodder for the media, turning images of women into objects for consumption. Laws such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1986 and the Basic Act for a Gender Equal Society of 1999 were passed and a gender-equal society seemed to be on the way, but in reality there remained a pervasive sense of incongruity between the individual and society, as seen in the marital and family systems, social norms of heterosexuality, and conventions of femininity and masculinity. Now, in the 2020s, social changes are stirring as small voices raising dissent connect through the Internet and gain strength. Feminism, which was thought of as only for women, is extending a helping hand to anyone who feels out of place in society. In recent years, the word has begun to be used in the plural form: feminisms. Ways of thinking about and understanding feminism differ depending on people’s generation and era, nation and ethnic group, environment and values. The message of pluralistic feminisms is the importance and necessity of members of society mutually acknowledging diverse ways of thinking. In this exhibition, works by nine artists, each with their own perspective, offer a window into expressions of feminism in Japan, and how artists perceive gender, the body, society, and what lies beyond. ●List of works / description
… -
- Past
Collection Exhibition 1: Inner Cosmology
2021.6.15(Tue.) - 2021.11.3(Wed.)
In our day-to-day lives there are a great many things over which we have no power. In the face of this reality, by communicating their thoughts to a specific deity, or perhaps to spirits dwelling in nature, or by looking into their own hearts, since time immemorial people have immersed themselves in the vast cosmos beyond their reach alone, and gone about their lives hoping that this transcendent force will bring them reliable everyday blessings. And now as ever, various acts of prayer, religion, and reflection are part and parcel of our daily lives. One source of the arts, including fine art, music, and dance, also sat alongside these everyday acts. Art, which renders invisible worlds visible, served as a medium to guide people to the infinite universe. And though times change, as long as we continue to seek day-to-day peace in our lives, perhaps this role of art is also manifested in contemporary art, in a different form. “Inner Cosmology” attempts to unravel this aspect of contemporary art through the lens of religion, prayer and reflection (introspection), using mainly works from the Museum’s own collection. By giving visitors a glimpse into myriad cultures from around the world, through their different forms of religion, prayer, and reflection, we hope this exhibition will not only offer a new perspective on art today, but encourage greater understanding of the sheer diversity of religious culture.
… -
- Past
Somewhere Between the Odd and the Ordinary
2021.4.29(Thu.) - 2021.9.26(Sun.)
Today, more than a year after the outbreak of the novel coronavirus pandemic, which began in early 2020, there is still no sign that the virus is abating. While daily life has changed throughout the world, in Japan, a country long prone to earthquakes, typhoons, and other natural disasters, many people are accustomed to living with the anxiety and tension that some kind of threat may arise in everyday life. In this exhibition, we reexamine aspects of everyday life that we have no choice but to be aware of. First of all, what makes an everyday thing everyday? Some of these things include the little habits and daily chores that we carry out in our lives, and the appointments that we make with our family and others in the area. There are also things like the passage of time and landscapes, which remain largely the same. But even when we repeatedly perform some kind of activity as a matter of course, everyday life differs depending on the person or family. Some of the works in this exhibition focus on tiny creative acts in our lives that we tend to ignore or overlook. Others capture the inner workings of the heart when we are faced with sudden loss or disaster. And still others express the ever-changing form of everyday life. What emerges somewhere between the odd and the ordinary is the present. List of works
… -
- Past
Collection Exhibition: Scales
2020.10.17(Sat.) - 2021.5.9(Sun.)
When viewing an object or space, we often sense it to be smaller or larger than we thought. This occurs not simply because of the “size” of the object or space but because our perception arises, relatively, from our viewing position as well as our physical memory of a relationship with the object or space. This exhibition will look at “scale”—a variable based on our relationship with an object—as opposed to “size,” a measurable attribute. Works by the Museum’s collected artists will be displayed in seven galleries having different proportions. In every case, the world expressed by the work—that of landscape, void, resonant sound, personal memory, or the time of plants and inorganic objects—is difficult to measure and will appear different depending on our scale of measurement. This exhibition will give viewers occasion to ponder the varying scales we continually form with our senses. List of works
… -
- Past
MICHAËL BORREMANS MARK MANDERS: Double Silence
2020.9.19(Sat.) - 2021.2.28(Sun.)
Both Michaël Borremans and Mark Manders are known to the world for unique and unconventional expression grounded in the proud traditions of European art. The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa is now delighted to present “Double Silence,” an exhibition that will see the works of these two artists occupying the same space for the first time. The wave of globalization that gathered momentum from the end of the 20th century began in the west, and proceeded to wash up in various parts of the world, making an impact wherever it broke and simultaneously sucking up myriad things, material and otherwise, as well as people, to form a heaving swell that now covers the entire globe. What we refer to as “contemporary art” shares the same trajectory as this mighty torrent of people, things and ideas. Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent multipolarization of art, the degree to which art possesses the unique qualities of particular regional cultures and histories has been in question. Thirty years on, the art world – caught between globalization and multipolarization – is beginning to reflect less on the importance of cultural differences grounded in locality, than on what our universal human values might actually be. There are a number of possible reasons for this shift, but it could simply be that in the modern world, where the dissemination of information at lightning speed has engendered a kind of global simultaneity, we are now noticing that exploration of universal values is not confined to any specific region. Moreover, COVID-19 has made introspection in the arts a global phenomenon. Following in the footsteps of a European art tradition that has explored universal human values over many centuries, Michaël Borremans and Mark Manders share their own such reflections with those of us inhabiting the same times. The paintings of Borremans, who mines Baroque tradition to portray the dark recesses of the human soul, and sculptures of Manders, with their striking pieces of bodies, created in accordance with the artist’s concept of “self-portrait as a building,” may employ different media, but both delve deeply into complex psychological states and relationships. In “Double Silence,” Borremans and Manders invite the viewer into a space and time in which the artists themselves engage in a dialogue through their works, as the title suggests, amid calm or silence. The word “double” means to be twice as much, twofold, but also has several other meanings, such as two together, distinctly different aspects (eg “dual personality”), and forming a pair. All of which makes the title of this exhibition eminently suitable for a show by two artists who are themselves far from straightforward. We hope you will take the opportunity to visit this exhibition of over eighty sympathetically curated works by two of the top artists in Europe today.
… -
- Past
de-sport: The Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Sports through Art
2020.6.27(Sat.) - 2020.9.27(Sun.)
In anticipation of the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games next year, this exhibition sets out to reexamine the significance of sports from an artistic perspective. The title, de-sport, is a newly coined term derived from the medieval French word desport, meaning “to enjoy,” and the idea of dismantling and rebuilding sports, expressed by the phrase “deconstructed sport.”* In tracing the etymology of the word “sport,” one finds that it originally meant “an enjoyable diversion from routine labor,” and included artistic pursuits such as music, theatre, painting, and dance. In contrast to contemporary sports – a parade of consummate physiques and skills, and a commodification of competition as entertainment – this exhibition returns to the roots of sports and adopts an artistic viewpoint in order to reconsider these activities as social constructs that reflect various issues of the day, including play, the body, the state, war, and non-verbal communication. Don’t miss this chance to watch and experience sports, deconstructed and reconstructed from the artistic perspectives of ten artists from nine countries around the globe. *The exhibition title was inspired by Eugene Kangawa’s solo exhibition “supervision / Desport.” ●List of works / description
… -
- Past
Rei Naito: Mirror Creation
2020.6.27(Sat.) - 2020.8.23(Sun.)
Stretches of earth extend in places where tiny people stand and water falls, swaying threads and ribbons spawn breezes, beads and glass invite the light inside. While engaging in a dialogue with space, Rei Naito combines natural elements with delicate motifs, and layers faint colors on canvas to evoke primordial scenes of life. In this solo exhibition, Naito, an artist who has consistently endeavored to “transcend what people (I) make,” deals with “creation” for the first time. Naito suggests that this will be an act of becoming a person while acknowledging the fact that people are the main constituent in creation. This process involves moving back and forth between human beings and nature, you and I, life and death, inside and outside, and people and art as well as copying, reflecting, and altering these things. In developing a sense of unity with the anima and compassion that emerges from these mirrored images, a moment of creation arises as one attempts to face life. The exhibition venue will consist of galleries of various sizes, light courts, and the spaces created by the corridors that connect them. In the daytime, natural light, varying according to the weather and time, will fill the spaces. After the evening, the works will be illuminated. There, visitors will find creations made by the artist, some very small, and each person’s perceptions will be freed by the sense of resonance with the act of human creation that they see and feel. Visitors can move back and forth between the corridors and the galleries, and in and outside of life. And as they repeatedly see and are seen, they are certain to grasp a vision of life.
… -
- Past
chelfitsch & Teppei Kaneuji
Eraser Forest
2020.2.7(Fri.) - 2020.2.16(Sun.)
Hot on the heels of “Eraser Mountain” for the theater now comes “Eraser Forest” for the museum! “Eraser Forest” is a piece of theater to be staged in the galleries of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. Except that rather than the usual theatrical relationship of performer vs spectator, it will attempt to create an experience in which the environment itself becomes the drama. Playwright Toshiki Okada and contemporary artist Teppei Kaneuji will turn the Museum’s galleries into a laboratory in a fascinating work that addresses the use of bodily expression to rethink relationships between people and objects in the Anthropocene era.
… -
- Past
15th Anniversary Exhibition
Where We Now Stand—In Order to Map the Future[2]
2020.2.4(Tue.) - 2020.4.12(Sun.)
Now in our 15th anniversary year, the museum’s collection stands at 3,880 artworks—an achievement of the two decades since collecting began in 2000, prior to the museum’s opening. In those two decades, society has changed radically, a phenomenon the collection strongly reflects in its growing number of artworks sharply attuned to their times. This exhibition will reinterpret the collected works from the perspective of today’s issues so as to form a picture of where we now stand, in a complexly diversifying world, and begin sketching out a map of the future.
… -
- Past
15th Anniversary Exhibition
Where We Now Stand—In Order to Map the Future[2]
2019.10.12(Sat.) - 2019.12.19(Thu.)
Now in our 15th anniversary year, the museum’s collection stands at 3,880 artworks—an achievement of the two decades since collecting began in 2000, prior to the museum’s opening. In those two decades, society has changed radically, a phenomenon the collection strongly reflects in its growing number of artworks sharply attuned to their times. This exhibition will reinterpret the collected works from the perspective of today’s issues so as to form a picture of where we now stand, in a complexly diversifying world, and begin sketching out a map of the future.
… -
- Past
15th Anniversary Exhibition
Where We Now Stand—In Order to Map the Future[1]
2019.9.14(Sat.) - 2019.12.19(Thu.)
Now in our 15th anniversary year, the museum’s collection stands at 3,880 artworks—an achievement of the two decades since collecting began in 2000, prior to the museum’s opening. In those two decades, society has changed radically, a phenomenon the collection strongly reflects in its growing number of artworks sharply attuned to their times. This exhibition will reinterpret the collected works from the perspective of today’s issues so as to form a picture of where we now stand, in a complexly diversifying world, and begin sketching out a map of the future.
… -
- Past
AWAZU Kiyoshi: What Can Design Do
2019.5.18(Sat.) - 2019.9.23(Mon.)
Since 2006, 2939 works and materials in the artist’s collection have been gifted to this museum and carefully researched. In 2007, the museum presented “Graphism in the Wilderness: Kiyoshi Awazu,” exhibiting 1,750 of the gifted works along workshops, performances, and valuable testimonies from creators having past involvement in Awazu’s activities. Based on its ongoing research of the Awazu collection, the museum from 2014 to ’18 hosted a five-part series, “Awazu Kiyoshi: Makurihirogeru,” exploring facets of Awazu’s world under specific themes such as performance, architecture and photography. Now in 2019—a decade after Awazu Kiyoshi’s passing—we are presenting an ambitious Awazu Kiyoshi retrospective, representing the culmination of this museum’s years of research. Inviting his son, AWAZU Ken, in the role of exhibition supervisor, we will clearly reveal the essence of Awazu’s design from the perspective of his undying interest in ordinary people and his primary motivation—“Designing society.” Such is an important perspective for us as well, as people entrusted with creating the society of tomorrow. Taking this opportunity, furthermore, the museum will formally open its entire Awazu Kiyoshi archives database to public access and begin making some works available as open data. Through non-hierarchical image reproduction, a condition Awazu viewed as a “popular icon” of creative freedom, we will carry on the artist’s spirit. ●Exhibition Composition ●List of works
… -
- Past
Oscar Oiwa Journey to the Light
2019.4.27(Sat.) - 2019.8.25(Sun.)
With brilliant, light-filled colors and dynamic spatial structures, Oscar OIWA creates vivid depictions of contemporary society that are infused with critical and humorous qualities. Born in São Paulo, Brazil to Japanese parents in 1965, Oiwa splits his time between Tokyo and New York, making works that share both the perspective of an ordinary urban dweller and an objective bird’s eye view. Addressing themes such as the cities and societies he inhabits and environmental problems, Oiwa freely integrates photographs, printed matter, and images from the Internet to realize a unique worldview that wavers between reality and fantasy, artifice and nature, and light and shadow. This exhibition explores Oiwa’s vision through a collection of approximately 60 works, with an emphasis on recent efforts, and a 27-meter-long drawing executed on a wall in the museum. In addition, the composer Chad CANNON was invited to take part in a collaborative project, in which Oiwa’s work served as the inspiration for a magnificent symphony that coalesces with the paintings. With any luck, the light that Oiwa pursues in his work while traveling all over the world will reawaken a sense of hope, helping us deal with the difficulty of living in the current era.
… -
- Past
Special Exhibition
【cancelled】Ryoji Ikeda
2023.11.18(Sat.) - 2024.5.12(Sun.)
The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa will present a special exhibition of Ryoji Ikeda in conjunction with this year’s theme, “Art x New Technology.” Ryoji Ikeda is an internationally acclaimed artist and composer whose diverse range of activities include immersive concerts and installations based on meticulous research, as well as performing arts and public art. Since the early 2000s, Ikeda has been exploring forms of artistic expression that seek to perceive the world from new perspectives, by working with big data in the natural sciences in creative ways. At this exhibition, Ikeda presents the new installation data.gram [n°6], consisting of 23 video works, some of which have never been exhibited before. “data.gram” is a new series that recomposes Ikeda’s large-scale audiovisual installation, the “data-verse” trilogy (2019-2020), from the ultramicroscopic world of invisible elementary particles to the ultramacroscopic world lying at the very end of the observable universe, in an attempt to explore the various scales found in the natural world. This new work will provide an opportunity to test our own perception and awareness of the harmony and chaos of the natural world.
… -
- Past
Rhizomatiks Kanazawa Radiance View
2023.10.14(Sat.) - 2023.11.26(Sun.)
How will society, our lives, and the future develop as a result of DX technology? Digital images that weave together the details and scenery of Kanazawa, both old and new, and connect them to each other as a new vision of a futuristic city welcomes visitors at the entrance to the museum.Data pertaining to various Kanazawa landmarks photographed in three dimensions will be sublimated into new images using state-of-the-art image processing technology. These images will be fused with original music by Daito Manabe and Nosaj Thing to forge a kind of artistic expression that has never been seen before.
… -
- Past
Collection Special Exhibition + Communication Program
NARA Yoshitomo ―Dog-o-rama
2023.4.29(Sat.) - 2023.9.18(Mon.)
This exhibition presents Yoshitomo Nara’s Dog-o-rama, Lonely Moon/Voyage of the Moon, and a group of drawings on display for the first time since their acquisition. All of these works were created as part of Nara’s exhibition “Moonlight Serenade” (2006-2007), which was conceived on the premise of the museum’s “open” function. Dog-o-rama is a project-type work created by a dog, an important motif for Nara. It consists of Pup Patrol, a project that expands the world of the museum as children in dog costumes tour the museum, and Pup Up the Dog, which completes the giant 7-meter-long stuffed animal, Pup King, filled with old clothes and other fabrics brought in by people. Dog-o-rama will provide visitors with an opportunity to participate in the work and experience the world of Nara’s artworks within the entire space, including drawings and plate paintings, as well as to reconsider how one might appreciate artworks in museums through the activities of children dressed as dogs.
… -
- Past
Shell of Phantom Light
2023.4.8(Sat.) - 2023.9.18(Mon.)
Using the raden (mother-of-pearl inlay) technique, the craft artist IKEDA Terumasa (1987-) depicts insubstantial objects such as data and electrical signals, as well as imaginary animals. Numbers fall down like rain, and patterns resembling electronic circuits exhibit movement depending on the angle. The iridescent light of the shells represents the electric current and data that underlie human life today. A conch features long water-tube grooves like a bone shell, while a dragonfly has five pairs of wings. The mother-of-pearl inlay decoration on the surface imparts the sublimity of the idol to these fictional forms. Ikeda’s act of creation is akin to a “Shin,” a mythical shell-like creature in folklore embodying a landscape that does not exist in this world by spitting out mirages. This exhibition presents a total of 14 works from the first 10 years of Ikeda’s creative practice, divided into two phases. The exhibition venue, which brings together his own collection and works, including biological and mineral specimens as well as toys and books, allows visitors a glimpse into Ikeda’s “Natural History,” as well as an intuitive experience of the genealogy of his outlandish forms. In order to express his exquisite worldview in the form of minute vessels, Ikeda introduced new technologies such as a cutting machine for the production of the base material, and a pulsed laser for the cutting out of the mother-of-pearl inlay chips, while continuing to use traditional lacquer techniques. Each step in the production process and the production of raden obi, the result of a collaboration with the textile industry, are introduced through videos.
… -
- Past
Aperto 18 GU Kenryou Intervals of the afterimage
2023.4.8(Sat.) - 2023.9.18(Mon.)
GU Kenryou employs an original technique known as “digital weaving,” in which multiple photographs are woven together at a pixel level to create photographic works with a textural quality resembling fabric, expressing the latent context underlying the images. This exhibition will feature a new series of large-scale photographs taken with a high-resolution camera in forests around the world, including the primeval forests of Fujian Province in China. As a result of their size, the images as a whole are not compressed or reduced to the framework of “flatness,” but rather trigger active movement of the viewer’s eye, evoking the sense of awe experienced and the ghostly murmurs heard in the shadows of a forest. Meanwhile, the artist’s distinctive method of weaving multiple images together manually in repeating rows and columns of pixels, one by one, generates fluctuations on an unconscious level that transcend the artist’s intentions, confining the natural spatial and temporal scale of the earth within the works in a complex fashion. Gu’s art stimulates our common planetary memory, and by imprinting the multi-temporal, multi-lingual, and multi-locational nature of the forest on our minds like an afterimage, brings about changes in the sensibilities of the contemporary viewer paralyzed by an accelerating deluge of visual information.
… -
- Past
lab.5 ROUTINE RECORDS
2022.10.1(Sat.) - 2023.3.21(Tue.)
This exhibition, the fifth in the lab. (short for “laboratory”) series, which was launched in 2017, not only makes use of the museum’s Design Gallery as a display venue, but it also focuses on the production process by turning the space into a site for investigative research and experimentation. In this edition, we introduce a new project called ROUTINE RECORDS by the spirited experimental welfare unit HERALBONY, which in recent years has explored the potential for welfare and art across a host of disciplines. In this project, the unit carefully developed sounds that were derived from the habitually repeated, everyday actions (routines) of people with intellectual disabilities, who attend special needs schools and welfare facilities in Kanazawa or other areas, and turned them into music. The venue a corner where visitors can listen to individual sounds, experimental compositions made by professional musicians out of routine sounds, and a DJ booth, where visitors can remix the sounds made by these routines and use them to create new music. This allows them to experience the creative process of turning the sounds they hear into music from a variety of different angles. The exhibition provides participants with the opportunity to develop a deeper awareness and sensitivity toward people from a wide range of backgrounds.
… -
- Past
APERTO 17
SCAN THE WORLD [NEW GAME]
2022.10.1(Sat.) - 2023.3.19(Sun.)
SCAN THE WORLD (STW) is a project to scan the city with portable handy-scanners, led by artists ISHIGE Kenta (born in Tokyo, 1994) and BIEN (born in Tokyo, 1993). STW is at once an ongoing street practice and a new form of play, in which anyone can participate. In [NEW GAME], the long-term project room at the museum will be transformed into a meeting place for people to participate in STW. An enormous stone tablet floats in the gallery inscribed with the rules for the project, like an artifact unearthed from an ancient site. Appearing as if providing an analysis and research on this tablet, the exhibition presents STW’s activities up until now, as well as its plans for the future with prospective participants. STW will provide a unique website as an integral part of the exhibition, a platform to connect the different practice of play through past and future. Here, anyone can upload and view the visual data of textures collected in various cities. Places and people from all over the world will be connected through images and the act of playing. Throughout the six-month exhibition, ISHIGE Kenta and BIEN will stay in Kanazawa, inviting people to participate. STW will be open to the city with the museum as the starting point, and it will continue to evolve as an ongoing form of play on the street with expanding players. scan-the-world.net 2022- In Cooperation with: Konel inc. Design: NUMATA Sou
… -
- Past
APERTO 16
AKI INOMATA Acting Shells
2022.4.9(Sat.) - 2022.9.11(Sun.)
The practice of AKI INOMATA (b. 1983) sheds light on the relationships between humans and other species, presenting artworks that are often created in collaboration with a variety of living creatures. INOMATA’s solo exhibition Acting Shells is centered around the artist’s ongoing project Memory of Currency. Conceived in 2015, the project attempts to create “fossils of currencies” by fusing portraits of figures that symbolize contemporary currencies around the world with pearl oyster shells. Humans, since ancient times, have used shells as one of the most important means of currency exchange. In today’s society where crypto-currencies and e-money are seemingly about to sweep over the physical ones, this project offers us an opportunity to reconsider with fresh eyes the economic and social systems we are surrounded by, through retracing the history of currencies and thus traversing the past and present. Shells naturally serve the purpose of a “shelter” (or yado, from which the Japanese word for hermit crabs, yadokari, originates) that provides protection for shellfish. The exhibition presents a multifaceted significance of “shells” for different species such as hermit crabs and asari clams (molluscan shells), facilitating meditations around the evolutionary histories of both human societies and of life on earth at large, in relation to the proactive acts observed with spices. INOMATA’s artworks suggest diverse meanings of “shells,” cultivating our imaginations of various time and space.
… -
- Past
Jeff Koons×BERNARDAUD
2022.4.9(Sat.) - 2022.9.11(Sun.)
Jeff Koons (b. 1955, York, PA; lives and works in New York) continues to captivate the world with his unique iconography that combines the themes of American popular culture and celebrity. This exhibition, presented in collaboration with the porcelain brand Bernardaud from Limoges, France, will feature Koons’ signature balloon dogs along with other innovative and extremely intricate design work.
… -
- Past
Aperto 15
TOMIYASU Yuma The Pale Horse
2021.10.30(Sat.) - 2022.3.21(Mon.)
TOMIYASU Yuma (b. 1983) has presented many installations featuring spatial effects that blur distinctions between real and unreal, with themes such as psychic and paranormal phenomena and the world of dreams. The unique world of her work disrupts the perceptions of the viewer, stimulating the senses – including at times the mysterious sixth sense – heightening awareness of the uncertain and invisible that we tend to avoid, and questioning the essence of perceptual experience. Tomiyasu’s new installation created for this exhibition was inspired by a dream she had as a child, and the setting is a hut that appeared in that dream. The horse in the painting hanging on the wall of the hut was inspired by the Pale Horse, ridden by a knight symbolizing Death, in the Book of Revelation in the New Testament of the Bible. The work beckons the viewer who enters the gallery toward a strange and fantastical experience in which reality and fiction intersect. In recent years, the experientially-based world of the artist’s works, which takes an increasingly dynamic approach to presentation of the traditional medium of painting and incorporation of the spaces it occupies, creates novel opportunities for viewers to encounter what has previously gone unseen. handout
… -
- Past
Aperto 14
HARADA Yuki: Waiting for
2021.6.15(Tue.) - 2021.10.17(Sun.)
Throughout his career Harada Yuki (b. 1989) has dealt in artists and art forms such as Christian Riese Lassen, and ghost photography, which despite occupying a solid position in the visual culture of a particular era, languish on the margins of art history. This solo outing will consist of a video installation incorporating “Waiting for,” Harada’s first new series in two years. In 2017, Harada began collecting photos mainly picked up by junk removal contractors, and subsequently unwanted. 2019’s One Million Seeings shows the artist personally taking in his hand each one of these photos and examining it. This act of casting an eye over images that were once seen by someone, then abandoned, and which will eventually disappear from both memory and history, took a whole twenty-four hours. Meanwhile, the work Waiting for, Harada’s latest offering and first in his “Waiting for” series, uses the CGI (computer-generated imagery) technology employed in the production of open world games to present “scenes from a million years ago/in the future.” In a world created entirely through artificial means, a voice recites the names of all the animals existing on Earth, in a work sure to summon up strong sensations of absence. At first glance contrasting works, both One Million Seeings and Waiting for document humans engaging with vast amounts of information and attempting to incorporate it. The artist refers to this act as “Waiting.” The act of looking at something that once existed, and waiting for something that might visit, could be described as entrusting oneself to the temporal void between before and after an event. In an age when people pick up, and simultaneously let go, enormous volumes of information on a daily basis, “Waiting for” will offer one man’s approach to engaging with the world. handout
… -
- Past
Doug Aitken: i am in you
2021.4.29(Thu.) - 2021.11.23(Tue.)
This exhibition showcases Doug Aitken's i am in you, presented at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa for the first time since its acquisition. Doug Aitken is known for an incredibly diverse body of work ranging from video, photography, sculpture and architectural interventions, to sound, installation, and film offerings. i am in you is a 5-screen video installation. Amid everyday scenes of American suburbia, people, nature, manmade objects, and geometric designs overlap deftly with a young girl's whispering voice, hands clapping in rhythm, and a piano melody, drawing the viewer inexorably into the flow of hallucinatory images on the video. As these images repeat continuously, fragmenting without providing any firm narrative contours, the audience feels the power and speed of this elusive state of flux at a visceral level, experiencing the work as a wandering journey through a vortex of visuals and sound. This is a stunning opportunity to experience first-hand the dynamism of a Doug Aitken video installation in the spacious surroundings of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.
… -
- Past
Kodomochounaikai: playing, learning, connecting through design
2021.4.3(Sat.) - 2022.3.21(Mon.)
Kodomochounaikai Jimukyoku, established in 2014 by architect Shikichi Kaori, is an organization that assembles and runs workshop programs to cultivate the intelligence and sensitivity that enable children to identify issues and solve problems creatively, through design. Kodomochounaikai Jimukyoku provides supervision and support for the activities of children's design teams called called “Kodomochounaikai.” The design activities of these “Kodomochounaikai” ultimately coalesce in the form of a “festival” that connects them to the local community. The children who design the festival get to engage with many other children and, families, and local residents enjoying the festival, and interact with the many friendly adults providing support and watching overseeing their activities. Kodomochounaikai program festivals become places for children to experience a successful realization of ideas, and be part of society. As well as providing an overview of Kodomochounaikai activities since 2014, in a Kanazawa edition of the program, visitors to this exhibition will have the chance to experience the process of design education with children and local residents, and explore the possibilities of design, in the lead-up to a Kodomochounaikai “festival” in Kanazawa.
… -
- Past
Aperto 13
TAKAHASHI Haruki Landscaping
10:00-18:00(until 20:00 on Fridays and Saturdays)
What do people think as they walk around a garden? Whether lingering in solitude, or enjoying the surroundings while chatting with a friend or loved one, a garden is generally a place for a change of mood. TAKAHASHI Haruki (b. 1971) creates garden-like settings in museum spaces. A devotion to making installations with a landscape or nature theme brought TAKAHASHI to the idea of the “enrin” as a way of creating a personal, individual connection between viewer and work, rather than shouting loudly at wider society. Enrin (yuanling) is a general term for Chinese gardens, whose structure offers encounters with a series of different landscapes as the viewer strolls around. Each landscape has its own philosophical element, making the garden a condensed version of different scenes from human existence. As a person walks around, their own life is mirrored in their heart, connecting them with the cosmos. The garden created in the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, will have water, mountain, light, and darkness. The numerous wild grasses are flora we live alongside. The translucent white porcelain is so fragile it may break on contact, but if handled carefully, will last forever in its current form. Landscapes both robust and fragile are sure to remind the viewer forcefully of the ephemeral nature of life, and the many memories that vanish, only to reappear. Enrin gardens use nature as their material, yet are by no means natural. They are “works” that reflect complex ideas, and are designed with the viewer in mind. TAKAHASHI will consciously move away from a Western art history context to create in the gallery space a garden that reflects the individual spirituality of all those who see it—part of his attempt to explore a more eastern approach to the idea of the installation.
… -
- Past
SATOSHI MURAKAMI Living Migration
2020.10.17(Sat.) - 2021.3.7(Sun.)
Satoshi Murakami (b. 1988) graduated with a degree in architecture from the Musashino Art University in March 2011, the same month as the devastating earthquake and tsunami hit the Tohoku region. The disaster prompted the artist to launch a project titled “Living Migration,” in which he walks around carrying on his back a house he made from styrofoam, changing location continuously. This he has done both in Japan and overseas. The project was sparked by questions Murakami had surrounding the loss of so many people’s homes to the quake and tsunami, the decline of communities after the disaster, and the fact that despite contracting to rent a house just prior to the quake, he and a group of friends were not immediately able to move in. Exploring an everyday existence in which we live to accumulate more money and possessions than we need, and the social conditions and reasons that differentiate public and private spaces, this project considers how the lifestyles of individuals impact on wider society. Joining Living Migration 2015.5–2018.9 acquired by the Museum in 2019, the exhibition will be the first-ever survey of Murakami’s “Living Migration” project in its entirety, from its launch on April 5, 2014 to the present day. The exhibition space, composed of diaries, drawings and photos detailing the people, landscapes and events Murakami met with while traveling with his portable dwelling, and a map showing the route taken by him, gives a sense of actually living the migration alongside the artist, and being right among his thoughts and dilemmas. During the exhibition, the latest work in Murakami’s “Advertising Sign House” project, based on the “Living Migration” project, will be installed in the Museum’s garden. We anticipate that these works employing unique methods to convey the doubt and unease the artist has sensed in society, and offering a place for discussion, will encourage us to confront what it means to live in Japanese society since the Tohoku quake, reawakening our own powers of thought around many related issues.
… -
- Past
Museum of the people, by the people, for the people
2020.7.18(Sat.) - 2021.3.21(Sun.)
In October 2019, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa celebrated its fifteenth anniversary. Located in the heart of the city of Kanazawa, over the past fifteen years the museum has pursued its activities with the goal, among others, of working with local citizens to create a participation-oriented museum that adds vitality to the community. Over time, people have perhaps grown less conscious of the presence of the museum than when it first appeared, looking so fresh and novel. The past fifteen years have also seen some dramatic changes in the museum’s setting, that is, in the city of Kanazawa. In particular, while the museum as a now-popular tourist spot attracts a large number of visitors from out of town and overseas, one suspects the pressure of this relentless tourist tide may have gradually detached it somewhat from the everyday lives of Kanazawa locals. Fifteen years on, this exhibition offers a fresh opportunity for “us” to think about “our museum.” How does a museum conceived with the aim of being created alongside citizens, and revitalizing the community, appear in the eyes of Kanazawa people today? And what vision do they expect it to paint for the future? This exhibition aims to address, from various angles, the idea of “our museum” now. “Museum of the people, by the people, for the people” will be the creation not of artists, but the voices of those same local people, and museum visitors, who take center stage at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. A participatory exhibition, it will invite people to think about what the museum has been so far, and what it could be in the future, via interviews, and a series of seminars for Kanazawa residents. We hope it will encourage those who come to 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and those yet to make its acquaintance, to start thinking of it as “our museum,” and for the museum, for its part, to ponder its future direction by taking on board the views expressed via the exhibition.
… -
- Past
Aperto 12
ANZAI Tsuyoshi Poly-
2020.6.27(Sat.) - 2020.11.23(Mon.)
ANZAI Tsuyoshi (born in 1987) uses everyday objects as his primary medium, above all cheap plastic products consumed everywhere around the world. Removing their original function and meaning, he displays the plastic items as objects and compels us to question our interpretations of them and relationship with them. Everyday objects that move in unexpected ways, sculptures created from plastic packaging normally tossed in the rubbish, and drawings that trace the outlines of plastic fragments... Anzai’s works, colorful and interesting to look at, strike us somehow like an extension of children’s play. Yet, to see familiar objects engaging in unfamiliar behavior evokes an eerie sense of disorientation. The exhibition’s title “Poly-” derives from a prefix used in the names of several materials generically referred to as plastic: polyethylene, polystyrene, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride, and so on. Besides meaning “many” and “multi-,” the prefix also indicates a condition of chemical molecules transformed (polymerized) into large single chain-like molecules. We may be aware such materials derive from crude oil, but most of us simply call them all “plastic” and use them every day without really understanding how they are made or the differences among them. Today, while their volumes of consumption and methods of disposal pose grave problems in the world, plastics are so much a part of everyday life we can hardly imagine living without them. Anzai speaks of our relationship with plastic as marked by “a strange close-yet-far distance.” This exhibition will examine the uncertainty and incomprehensibility of society around us.
… -
- Past
Lab.4 Space Syntax *Suspended
2019.10.12(Sat.) - 2020.6.14(Sun.)
“Spaces” are where we live. We perceive spaces, by various means, and if a space changes, so does our behavior. Thus it would seem spatial layout and human behavior are closely related. Where might we find the key to illuminating that relationship? This fourth exhibition in the “lab.” series will search for this key, via research and analysis from the perspectives of connections and relationships. The important term here is “space syntax”: syntax referring to a system for deriving meaning based on the relationship between words. Space syntax is the name given to a thesis developed in the 1970s by Bill Hillier, a professor at The Bartlett (Faculty of the Built Environment) of University College London, and to the eponymous global firm engaged in its practice. The theory and practice of space syntax, which incorporates a scientific approach to analyzing spatial layout, and contemplates the relationship between human perceptions and behavior, has attracted growing attention in recent years as a new technique for the design of urban and architectural spaces. While showcasing this space syntax theory and practice, for the duration of the exhibition we will also be undertaking two research/analysis projects at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. The first will be a study of indoor behavior. A video analysis technique employing new technologies such as machine learning will be introduced to observe the flow of people around pathways inside the museum, and when and where people stop, and sit, to analyze the relationship between spatial layout, and human perception and behavior. The second will target the museum’s Exhibition Zones, surveying the routes taken by visitors. The idea will be to identify new possibilities for the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, by analyzing features of the museum’s spatial layout, and exploring their potential. These research activities will be undertaken by enlisting help from the research supporters who also took part in the “lab.1 OTON GLASS” and “lab.2 Sight” exhibitions, with outcomes being collated and updated in the Design Gallery, venue for “lab. 4.” Perhaps that key illuminating the relationship between spatial layout and human behavior will be found in our transparent glass laboratory.
… -
- Past
Aperto 11
KUNO Ayako Metamorphoses of the City
2019.7.6(Sat.) - 2019.9.23(Mon.)
KUNO Ayako (b. 1983, Tokyo) employs lost-wax casting in her work. Lost-wax is a technique in which intricate forms made from wax are turned into casts, and Kuno uses it to produce pieces that combine the hard, solid texture of metal, with a dedication to detailed design. This exhibition presents works produced out of an earnest attitude to engage with metal and forge a dialogue with the method of metal casting: KUNO’s display of high-density formative aesthetics applied to robust metal creating works on an urban theme, that conjure up visions of a writhing, proliferating metropolis, morphing as it is constructed. TATEMATSU Yumiko, Curator
… -
- Past
Special Exhibition
NAWA Kohei "Foam"
2019.4.27(Sat.) - 2019.8.25(Sun.)
NAWA Kohei will display Foam, an installation employing foam and light. Foam—tiny bubbles appearing in succession and coalescing in a mass. Nawa expresses foam’s power to autonomously create an organic structure. The individual bubbles, which are born and die in a process resembling the cellular processes of metabolism and circulation, awaken in viewers associations with the source of life.
… -
- Past
Koichi Sato: Third Landscape
2019.4.6(Sat.) - 2019.9.23(Mon.)
At a time when artworks centered on the visual sense still predominate, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa is proud to be staging a exhibition that explore the next possibilities for art museum activities by embracing new expression that stirs not only the sense of sight but also the non-visual senses of hearing and smell. Based on an interest in anthropology and botany, SATO Koichi (b. 1990) has examined the possibilities of entities that teeter ambiguously on various boundaries. He inquires into the boundary – invisible but certainly present – between “the self” and “that which is not the self,” complexly combining not only video and installations but also non-visual media such as sound and smell to present a future in which these entities co-exist while fluctuating between the two. The exhibition title, “Third Landscape,” derives from a concept put forward by leading French gardener / garden designer Gilles Clément, indicating space in which the evolution of the landscape is left entirely to nature. According to this concept, places such as vacant city lots, abandoned land in farming villages and borders between countries that have been neglected or suppressed by humans are assessed positively as privileged places receptive to biodiversity. One could say that this “third landscape,” in which various elements are able to exist complexly alongside each other, offers a range of suggestions as to the nature of the relationship between people and plants in our society going forward. Based on this symbolic term and including such works as the fig reproduction-themed Mutant Variations, this exhibition provides a bird’s eye view of Koichi Sato’s current practice. *The announced exhibition change was canceled due to the conveniences.
… -
- Past
Aperto 10
YOKOYAMA Nami Memories of Love and Me
2019.4.6(Sat.) - 2019.6.30(Sun.)
YOKOYAMA Nami (1986-) produces paintings depicting motifs of objects that are consumed or discarded in everyday life. By giving a leading role to items ordinarily ignored, whose fate it is to be thrown away, she distances herself from predefined meanings and uses, endeavoring to see in new ways and express “the primordial beauty and meaning of existence inherent in all things.” This exhibition will feature works addressing the themes she has recently turned her energies to—“What is love?” and “What is beauty?” Yokoyama’s neon series of paintings depict both the beautiful light of the neon tubes—their leading role—and their “unsightly” wiring, power cords, and mounting hidden at the back. In this way, she gives equal prominence to our ideals and aspirations and our hidden side we are unable to gloss over. Then, her charcoal drawing series Memories of Love and Me, whose name lends this exhibition its title, depicts scenes of her memories of a girl and a dog named Love. After hearing the news that advances in selective breeding to meet people’s preferences in fact shorten the dogs’ lives, she felt compelled to examine the “love” we give our dogs. “Love”—a word used too casually these days. By exercising her qualms and misgivings or else serious emotions about “love” in artworks, she pursues the meaning of this word tossed around in everyday life. Through some 30 paintings and drawings—the fruits of Yokoyama’s investigation into “love”—visitors will have occasion to ponder the essential nature of things.
… -
- Past
Collection Asian Landscapes / AWAZU Kiyoshi: Makurihirogeru 5 (EXPOSE)" −Book Illustrations
2018.11.3(Sat.) - 2019.5.6(Mon.)
The many art styles coming out of Asia, while attuned to their particular vernacular history and culture, intently explore the interval between tradition and rapid globalization, working trial and error. This exhibition presents works that challenge the waves of post-industrialization and technological change, asking the universal question, “Where is humanity headed?” SUH Do Ho’s Home within Home – 1/11th Scale – Prototype will be displayed in the exhibition’s first period. The work—a 1/11-scale recreation of the Western building Suh first lived in when studying in the United States—is seen on closer inspection to contain a replica of his childhood Korean-style home. Zai Kuning will exhibit the culmination of his project researching and creatively substantiating the name of the first Malay King, Dapunta Hyang Jayanasa. The artist UJINO, in his sound sculpture Plywood Shinchi, employs everyday objects to evoke a “city” strongly nuanced with nostalgia. Japan is currently gripped by excitement over the upcoming 2020 Olympic Games, a mood reminiscent of the fever infecting the nation in the 1960s period of rapid economic growth. UJINO’s moving sculpture, while humorous in its motions, appears to harshly question materialistic civilization. In Parade from far far away, TERUYA Yuken, an Okinawan artist now living and working in New York, depicts motifs of dugongs, military drones and over 110 Okinawa people, using dye on a traditional Ryukyuan garment. Jun NGUYEN-HATSUSHIBA, in beautiful film images, evokes the nameless people whose lives have been sacrificed in times of political and social upheaval. Featured, along with film works concerning refugees and minorities, embarked on in 2001, is his recent piece dedicated to the Tohoku people who suffered a natural disaster ten years later in 2011. These works, illuminating our changing society from the perspectives of Asian artists, are displayed under the theme, “Asian Landscapes.”
… -
- Past
Aperto 09
Nishimura Yu paragraph
2018.10.6(Sat.) - 2019.3.24(Sun.)
NISHIMURA Yu (1982- ) complexly overlays commonplace scenes and actions, and fragments of “fulfillment” in everyday life to construct a single unified scene in a painting. His approach resembles that of a novelist assembling words and forming paragraphs to weave a narrative. While personal and small in scale, Nishimura says, the momentary scenes and pleasant spaces of our days lend us psychological support. While always concrete in nature, the phenomena Nishimura depicts appear as if occurring in a place remote from reality, owing to his characteristic blurred brushstrokes and coloring. This exhibition’s title, “paragraph,” implies one complete unit. When we see each painting as a paragraph and move through the exhibition, reading and absorbing the pictures dispersed throughout the venue, the rich everyday moments and scenes they portray will congeal in a narrative and speak to us. Viewers will likely want to remain endlessly in the venue’s spaces, looking at Nishimura’s paintings and imagining, not one, but multiple narratives. Featured will be 13 new works of varying sizes, displayed so as to draw viewers deeply into the narrative.
… -
- Past
Culture City of East Asia 2018 Kanazawa
Altering Home
2018.9.15(Sat.) - 2018.11.4(Sun.)
22 exhibiting artists decided ! Neighborhood encounters East Asian art In our modern age, a “home” is structured as a social system. Although the architectural, physical “house” is easy to generalize, the meaning of “home,” which is entwined with emotions, customs and culture, is difficult to capture unless it is considered multilaterally. In particular, nowadays when mobilization has become permanent by means of globalization, can “houses” or “homes” be found anywhere – or possibly, nowhere? Based on this question, within some of the unused spaces of Kanazawa, contemporary artists from Japan, China, and Korea will present their works on the theme of “home.”
… -
- Past
CULTURE CITY OF EAST ASIA 2018 KANAZAWA Cooperative Projects
Qiu Zhijie Living Writing
2018.9.8(Sat.) - 2019.3.3(Sun.)
Living Writing Through writing, primarily using the Chinese traditional calligraphy he learned as a child, QIU Zhijie has continually inquired into universal, primordial human existence. Fujian Province, where he was born, was once a vital center for seaborne trade, rich in cultural exchange born from commerce and immigration. Qiu’s works with their dynamic, free perspective are deeply influenced by the culture of his home region. This exhibition examines the art and expressive power of Qiu Zhijie, who sees the world comprehensively and merges his own existence with representation of the relationships between people and things.
… -
- Past
lab.3
DeathLAB: Democratizing Death
2018.7.7(Sat.) - 2019.3.24(Sun.)
DeathLAB, founded by Karla Rothstein at Columbia University in 2013, is an interdisciplinary initiative exploring the space and social consequence of urban disposition and memorialization. Housed at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, DeathLAB’s cross-cutting research engages diverse academic fields, including architecture, environmental engineering, religious studies and sociology. We will introduce the lab’s ongoing work, which intertwines sacred space and civic life.
… -
- Past
Starting Points: Japanese Art of the ‘80s
2018.7.7(Sat.) - 2018.10.21(Sun.)
As a repercussion of the conceptual and stoic art of the 1970s, and in response to trends in Europe and the United States, Japan in the ’80s bore witness to movements that urged the reinstatement of the painting and sculpture media. What came to prevail as a result was “New Painting” characterized by vibrantly colorful and dynamic brushstrokes that reflected the flourishing economic circumstances of the times. In the ‘90s, art thrived on the energy of ’80s subcultures such as “otaku,” but as a consequence, ’80s art faded from art historical discourse. In recent years both in Japan and abroad, rapid progress has been made in research on Postwar Japanese art up until the 1970s including “Gutai” and “Mono-ha.” Hence, we now find ourselves compelled to examine Japanese art of the intervening decade— the ’80s. Looking back, over 30 years later, we will see that art forms and concepts fundamental to today’s art blossomed in the ’80s, such as the art installation, viewer participation in the artwork, valuing relationship with society, the concept of alternative space, media art, perspectives of relativizing the institution of "art,” and the sensitivity to find significance in mundanity and lightness. This exhibition reconsiders Japanese art of the 1980s through contemporary perspectives and introduces works that represent “Starting Points.”
… -
- Past
Aperto 08
Nanakarage Ayano
2018.4.28(Sat.) - 2018.9.24(Mon.)
Taking as her theme the vastness of nature seen in mountains and forests, and the ephemerality of rainbows and mist, NANAKARAGE Ayano (1987-) meditates on such natural phenomena and, blending in her own interpretations and analogies, evokes its qualities in wood sculptures. Her “rainbows edge” series, featured in this exhibition, conjoins her own fabric-draped figure with the shapes of dried banana stems and other dried and withered plants. Her fusion of withered and gnarled plants with smooth drapery (a human figure) conveys a disquieting impression of old age melded with youth or some bizarre creature hidden under the fabric. At the same time, the works evoke the serenity of Buddhist or Shinto deity sculptures as well as the dread of having seen something forbidden. Vibrant living organisms age with time and grow dry and gnarled, and slowly change form. In such transformation, Nanakarage discovers a transcendent beauty. Her eye, as such, has the power to refresh our values as people of contemporary society conditioned to look away from deterioration and decay.
… -
- Past
Ay Tjoe Christine : Spirituality and Allegory
2018.4.28(Sat.) - 2018.8.19(Sun.)
Ay Tjoe Christine (b. 1973) was born in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia, and is a renowned contemporary artist active in Indonesia today. She studies intaglio printing methods such as drypoint and then turned to working with textiles. Her artistic activities got their real start around 2000. Ay Tjoe Christine’s works express themes based on Christian mythologies and spiritual concepts, supported by her deep insight into human incompletion and Janus-faced nature. The color fragments that scatter and float across her pictures reveal, on one hand, the actions of her own wavering emotions, while the abstract images that set up fascinating harmonies with the canvas’ negative space reveal her sincere stance as she investigates the relationship between humans and all things. This is Ay Tjoe Crhistine’s first solo exhibition at a Japanese museum, presenting about 50 works that trace her two decades of multifaceted creativity, from early period drawings and drypoint, to a group of oil paintings that explore the potential for expression from the representational to the abstract, soft sculptures and large-scale installations, and large format paintings created for this exhibition.
… -
- Past
Runa ISLAM Scale (1/16 inch= 1 foot)
2018.4.28(Sat.) - 2018.6.24(Sun.)
From the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa collection, we are pleased to present Runa Islam’s Scale (1/16 inch = 1 foot) in its first showing. Runa Islam continually explores the concepts behind cinematic ideas, subjects, and forms, as well as film’s power to affect our perception and reception of ideas and images. In her early films and installations, she referenced experimental and avant-garde films, and used their film lexicon to develop her own methodology. Analyzing and grasping the images, styles, and methods of modern cinema, she disrupts the relationships between reality and fiction, between visual and architectural space and between “seeing” and “being seen,” and throws the viewer’s interpretation of the narrative into confusion. By means of this process, she constructs a cinematic experience from her own perspective on the world. This work, a two-screen video installation, features a multilevel car park in Gateshead in northeast England that appears in a scene from the film Get Carter (1971, UK). Filmed on a stage set that imagines an unbuilt restaurant originally planned for the building’s top floor, it depicts interactions between two young waiters and two elderly male customers. At a certain moment, the actors exchange roles, and images of the actual location and the stage set, as well as the building and building model, become shuffled to up-tempo music. While the work uses the lexicon of suspense films—the looks and gestures of the actors, the camerawork, the switching between scenes, the lighting, the music, and so on—the shifting between reality and illusion is depicted with a lyrical touch. Moreover, because the screens are positioned one in front of the other, the audience becomes lost in the entangled world depicted in the work without being able to fully grasp it.
… -
- Past
Collection Exhibition Adventure in “Seeing”
2018.1.27(Sat.) - 2018.6.24(Sun.)
Seeing is something most of us take for granted. Yet, to consciously see is surprisingly difficult, and as a result, we tend to miss much of what there is to see. An art museum is a place for “seeing,” “admiring,” and “thinking about” artworks. To the visitors to this exhibition, whether they normally enjoy viewing artworks or find it difficult, we would like to say, “First of all, begin by seeing well.” The exhibition “Adventures in ‘Seeing’” starts there. Open yourself to the artwork a little more than usual. Stand and view it 10 seconds longer than usual. After viewing it thoroughly, relax and view it a little more. Doing so, you will begin to see details you had not noticed, and your imagination will have time to come into play. Discoveries, surprises, and new feelings will come to you in an experience really no different from an adventure story. Please look actively at the artworks and unfold your very own adventure story. (YAMASHITA Juri, exhibition curator)
… -
- Past
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller
2017.11.25(Sat.) - 2018.3.11(Sun.)
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s works display a command of sophisticated sound and video technology, and striking sculptural creations. The viewer undergoes a complex perceptual experience of “hearing and seeing” and enters their imaginative world in a spell of enchantment. When experiencing a Cardiff and Bures Miller work, unseen things become visible, soundless things are heard, and we suddenly step beyond reality into their stories with our senses and values in disarray. Cardiff and Bures Miller’s exhibition at this time features new works and eight installations being shown in Japan for the first time. Installed in the spatially autonomous galleries of this museum, the pieces will transport the audience to imaginary interconnected worlds. A precious opportunity to experience the work of a groundbreaking international artist team.
… -
- Past
Local Textile 1
TO & FRO Thinner, Lighter
2017.11.18(Sat.) - 2018.6.24(Sun.)
Part 1 the “Local Textile” series features TO & FRO, a travel gear brand of the Kaji Group based in Kanazawa and Kahoku. The brand’s name evokes an image of traveling lightly and comfortably “to and fro.” The Kaji Group, possessing advanced technology for weaving extremely thin thread, is producing fabric of unusually light nylon. The nylon fabric is currently used in products by outdoor brands around the world. TO & FRO is the Kaji Group’s own brand of travel organizers and other products created using this fabric. The travel organizers are displayed in this exhibition along with a wide range of fabric samples. Ishikawa prefecture, as a textile producer, has also developed a loom manufacturing industry. Although textile production tends to rely on division of labor, the Kaji Group possesses its own plant for customizing looms. Innovative production at the plant has enabled thread tensioning conducive of weaving with the thinnest, most easily breakable threads. High functionality is a powerful competitive edge over inexpensive mass-produced imported products and an important strategy for the future of Japan’s textile industry.
… -
- Past
TARO IZUMI A Child Suddenly
2017.10.7(Sat.) - 2018.3.25(Sun.)
Taro Izumi (1976 – ) is an artist mainly known for his installations that cross video, performance, drawing, painting, sculpture and other media, exhibiting his work frequently at home and abroad. Izumi’s work characteristically involves everyday matters and objects, and sometimes large numbers of people; by capturing actions that appear at first sight to have no real significance, Izumi highlights absurd experiences that lurk in everyday life. Time and space, real and virtual image, inside and outside, free and unfree – Izumi’s practice plays with and blurs such conventional divisions which we unthinkingly impose on the world, questioning them from startling angles. In this exhibition, Izumi is presenting four new artworks and one book project. Staged in Theater 21 and the Long-Term Project Room is B: But the lens had clearly captured the passing tiger., a work consisting of feature films – the artist’s first such endeavor – along with film posters and a popcorn stand. On the outside of the Long-Term Project Room, there is The Transparent Drool of Fantasy, a work whose concept is “windows fitted with night.” Dawn of the Compact Structures, which will be released halfway through the exhibition period, is a series of videos that superimposes multiple layers of time, resulting in a novel structure for a film. On top of these, works will be completed and added to the exhibition over Izumi’s long-term stay at Kanazawa, including Y: Raise your knee, now lower it. P: I put the stones away so they won’t trip., which sets its sights on the visitors to the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. Alongside these video works and installations, Izumi will also collaborate with a critic – a specialist at handling words – to produce A Dark Gray Book (provisional title). This work will explore, in book form, new means of communication that might be able to substitute and improve on words. Izumi has long probed the ever-unsolvable, ever-expanding question concerning the knotted relationship that films and images share with the human body and consciousness. This exhibition promises to be an extremely ambitious undertaking that presents a wholly new approach to this question, while remaining in touch with his practice to date.
… -
- Past
Jurgen Lehl The End of Civilization
2017.8.5(Sat.) - 2017.11.5(Sun.)
Designer Jurgen Lehl (1944-2014) lived at one with nature and continually reminded people of its preciousness. As his “last work” in life, he chose to engage with serious environmental problems, and he created beautiful lighting implements from plastic garbage washing up on beaches. In this way, the harmful plastic which cannot return to the soil instead illuminates spaces and once again serves people usefully. Along with Jurgen Lehl’s lighting implements, the exhibition also displays the “babaghuri” agates that Lehl long hunted and collected, fascinated by each stone’s unique beauty. “The End of Civilization” is a symbolic exhibition, imparting the message of respect for nature Jurgen Lehl left to us when he died suddenly in 2014.
… -
- Past
lab.2
Sight
2017.8.5(Sat.) - 2017.11.5(Sun.)
A project to develop “Sight,” a device that extends sensual perception, thereby transforming visual experience into something entirely new. (Project members: WAKE Naoki, SUZUKI Ryohei, FUSHIMI Ryohei and MUNAKATA Yuri.) By changing visual imagery into sound, the device enables us to “hear” the visual world just as porpoises and bats use sound to capture prey. We look at the project’s progress and open the venue as an ongoing research lab.
… -
- Past
150th Year Anniversary of Japan - Denmark Diplomatic Relations Exhibition
Everyday Life – Signs of Awareness
2017.8.5(Sat.) - 2017.11.5(Sun.)
Denmark and Japan have become design-oriented nations, each following a path that springs f rom a unique background of history and culture. The countries’ excellent design solutions, inspired by a functional, practical, yet aesthetic approach, are reflections of their cultural identities. Denmark has attracted tremendous attention as one of the most resilient design giants in the fields of architecture, furniture and everyday products since the 1930s. The country established a model for wealthy nations with a highly developed social system with regard to welfare, education and traffic solutions. Japan, on the other hand, is a country which has developed the symbolic design of the time, based on its unique culture and philosophy. The technical expertise required to produce simple and compact shapes and the knowledge and experience to make the most of the material, with a craftsmanship passed down from generation to generation, demonstrate Japan’ s unique position in the global design arena. This exhibition, Everyday Life – Signs of Awareness, showcases the impact of design-minded awareness through the works of designers, architects and artists from Japan and Denmark. It also presents and highlights everyday items that are part of modern life in both countries.
… -
- Past
Collection Exhibition 2 Undying Life
2017.7.22(Sat.) - 2018.1.8(Mon.)
Today, with the development scientific technologies such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology, long-standing social values are being vigorously shaken. This exhibition displays works concerned with the “migration” of life forms, ranging in spectrum from the transmigration of souls to the artificial creation of new species. We explore the meaning of creating new life forms and possibilities of living in “artificial nature.”
… -
- Past
Aperto 07
KAWAGOE Yurie Insect Specimen of a Coward
2017.5.27(Sat.) - 2017.9.24(Sun.)
“What if human emotions were expressed as insects?” Compelled by this thought, KAWAGOE Yurie (1987-) embodies the heart’s sentiments in imaginary insect figures and evokes a world of illusion. Her “insectified” (not “personified”) motifs she moreover arrays as insect specimens, thereby giving faces to our foolish, loveable emotions. Through her signature piece, “Insect Specimen of a Coward” and latest works, this exhibition will present Kawagoe Yurie’s world and the insect-like emotions she describes as “adorable.”
… -
- Past
Collection Exhibition 1
Collection 1 PLAY / AWAZU Kiyoshi, Makurihirogeru (EXPOSE) 4Makurihirogeru 4
2017.4.29(Sat.) - 2017.7.23(Sun.)
The meaning of PLAY is not limited to ‘activity engaged in for enjoyment and recreation.’ It is also a word that expresses active and aggressive acts in our daily life including ‘acting, performing, having a game, behaving and conducting oneself.’ Viewed in that light, our daily life is a succession of PLAY, which might be said to construct one’s personal life and in a broader sense, the culture of human beings. In this exhibition, works by 12 collection artists are introduced focusing on the keyword of PLAY with manifold meanings. They show diverse expansion from works which encourage new discoveries and ideas through viewers’ experiences, to works in which the accumulation of artists’ daily acts and thinking as well as performance and competition are incorporated. We would like to think about how PLAY that is an essential function of humankind appears in the works and what kind of relationship viewers and artworks can develop through the exhibition. We hope that this exhibition itself will inspire viewers to get involved in various PLAYs. Featured also is a small special exhibit of AWAZU Kiyoshi photographic works.
… -
- Past
lab.1
OTON GLASS
2017.4.8(Sat.) - 2017.7.23(Sun.)
The development of the OTON GLASS was occasioned by the project leader’s father’s dyslexia. A device combining glasses with a camera, the OTON GLASS helps people read by changing visual written information into aural voice information. This exhibition follows the development of the OTON GLASS as an aid not only for dyslexia sufferers but also for people in many circumstances where reading characters is difficult, such as travelers walking in cities overseas. In the venue, a space will be established for wearing an OTON GLASS prototype and actually experiencing its functions, so as to make clear the developers’ methods of research toward achieving practical use. Visitors are invited to see the “research site” of a young start-up that is fusing existing technologies to develop a revolutionary new device.
… -
- Past
IKEDA Manabu: The Pen ーCondensed Universeー
2017.4.8(Sat.) - 2017.7.9(Sun.)
Artist IKEDA Manabu (1973–) depicts a monumental world using a super-fine pen point. Working slowly—he can complete only a fist-sized area in a single day— Ikeda manifests a surreal alien world, employing minute delineation and a flair for grand composition. His massive pictures have won him acclaim around the globe. This will be the first large-scale exhibition presenting the entire scope of Ikeda’s production. His Rebirth, a new work he spent three years creating during an artist residency at Chazen Museum of Art in Wisconsin USA, is a must see.
… -
- Past
Aperto 06
TAKEDA Yusuke
2017.1.21(Sat.) - 2017.5.7(Sun.)
TAKEDA Yusuke (born Hiroshima, 1985) majored in painting at Kanazawa College of Art and in 2014 earned his doctorate at the College’s graduate school. Takeda currently lives and works in Kanazawa, creating installations that combine varying media including painting, photography, video, and sound. Since October last year, he has undertaken production on a daily basis at this museum, using the Project Room as his studio, and this exhibition presents his latest works emerging from in-residency production. Creations employing such media as painting, video, drawing, and statues are installed as independent works in the gallery space, yet meanwhile, they take “image depth / image humidity” as a basso continuo and appear before us as things indefinite or else unclear, overlapping at their deep layers, segmenting, shifting, and changing content. Such works and their correlation evoke coordinate axes containing images of “visible and invisible” and “reality and fiction,” and jolt our perceptions.
… -
- Past
THOMAS RUFF
2016.12.10(Sat.) - 2017.3.12(Sun.)
Thomas Ruff (born in 1958 in Zell am Harmersbach, Germany) has been a leading figure in contemporary photography since the 1990s when he emerged as part of the Becher School. Along with Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth, Ruff studied photography with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The exhibition introduces a wide range of works by this world-renowned photographer, stretching from his earliest efforts to his most recent and never-before-shown photographs. Ruff was first acclaimed for a series of huge two-meter-high portraits. Since then, he has explored a variety of themes, including architecture, urban landscapes, nudes, and celestial bodies. Through these subjects, he has developed a unique vision of the world we live in. The medium of photography, closely entwined with our vision and perception, is another important theme in Ruff’s work. He searches for new possibilities in photographic expression using a multitude of images as his materials. These not only include Ruff’s own pictures but everything from digital images from the Internet to old photographs he has collected. This exhibition consists of a total of 18 series, approximately 160 works, including Ruff’s first effort Interieurs; Porträts, which earned him widespread acclaim; cassini and ma.r.s., inspired by his boyhood interest in outer space; and nude and jpeg, which examine visual and information spaces in the age of the Internet, and his most recent photographs, press ++.
… -
- Past
The Boundary between Kogei and Design
2016.10.8(Sat.) - 2017.3.20(Mon.)
Kogei or Design? Kogei (craft) and design are divided in two distinct categories regardless of that fact that both are monozukuri (the making of things) and, in this sense, the same. We need not look close, however, to see works/products describable as “design-like Kogei” and “Kogei-like design” in the interval between them. This exhibition will show clearly the ambiguous boundary between Kogei and design by seeing them freshly from the perspectives “Process and Material,” “Hand and Machine,” “Form,” and “Sabi (Change over the Years).” While so doing, it will also consider possibilities on the horizon for Kogei and design, both of which are diversifying with the development of advanced technology.
… -
- Past
Aperto 05
KASHIKI Tomoko ~Daydream~
2016.9.17(Sat.) - 2017.1.9(Mon.)
A series introducing rising young artists in a solo exhibition format."Aperto" is Italian for "open."
… -
- Past
Collection 2
Diary / Awazu Kiyoshi and Architecture
2016.9.10(Sat.) - 2016.11.27(Sun.)
Diary The word diary derives from the Latin “dies,” meaning “a day.” In a diary, whether written or drawn, the daily recording of one’s life becomes an accumulation of time. Within that accumulation, an array of elements can be discerned—memory, physical action, traces, everyday life, and repetition. When someone’s personal diary is disclosed to the public, moreover, it becomes a part of “history.” This exhibition of works by eight artists employs the word “diary” with its multiple associations as a foothold for viewing and understanding those works. When memory of past actions and experiences receives formal expression in an artwork, what kind of “diary” can we discover in it? Awazu Kiyoshi : Makurihirogeru (EXPOSE) 3 Awazu Kiyoshi and Architecture 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa possesses in its collection some 3,000 artworks and materials by AWAZU Kiyoshi. “Makurihirogeru (EXPOSE)” is a series of exhibitions launched in 2014 to exhibit the Awazu collection from varying perspectives. Our third exhibition takes the theme, “architecture.” As a participant in the avant-garde architectural movement “Metabolism” in the 1960s, Awazu collaborated with numerous architects in creating spatial designs. He also employed graphic design to visually communicate that architectural movement’s principles. Awazu’s uniqueness lay in his ability to reinterpret and express Japanese tradition in modern design aimed at serving the masses. This exhibition divided in three sections (“Metabolism and EXPO '70,” “Collaborations with Architects,” and “Architecture Magazine Design”) will show how Awazu’s designs resonated with the Metabolist architectural movement and richly amplified its potential.
… -
- Past
no new folk studio
2016.5.21(Sat.) - 2016.9.25(Sun.)
Series Orphe is a shoe of a new dimension whose sole lights up and produces sounds like a musical instrument when the user moves. The trajectories of light and sound performed by the wearer arise from the wearer’s bodily motion. “no new folk studio Inc.” is a start-up launched in 2014 by KIKUKAWA Yuya. Wanting to work in the music field, Kikukawa began creating musical instruments and eventually developed a prototype for Orphe, a percussion instrument in the form of a shoe. Working in collaboration with engineers and designers, he has refined the instrument and will soon launch commercial sales. Orphe is not strictly a shoe or musical instrument. It transcends borders and genres of all kinds and offers the user unlimited possibilities to explore. This exhibition will present the video work Motion-Score, featuring a dancer wearing Orphe moving freely through the art museum in the darkness of night. The dancer’s “motion” converts to sound and light and becomes a performance, and hence, the dancer’s movement is like a “score.” On three screens, video imagery based on three themes will unfold—a “Tour” of strolling freely around inside the museum, a “Concert” performed by manipulating Orphe like a musical instrument, and “Reverberations” produced by the interplay of Orphe’s light and music with the spaces of the building. We invite you to enjoy the music interface, Orphe, created by a group of next-generation creators.
… -
- Past
Collection 1
Nous-sewing and living
2016.5.21(Sat.) - 2016.9.25(Sun.)
“Nous” is French for “we.” It can mean “we women” or “we men.” When it comes to artistic creation and giving a form to one’s ideas, there are no distinctions between women and men. “Handicrafts,” nevertheless, was long primarily viewed as a women’s creative field, and many women in the past, when seeking creative expression in daily life, spontaneously took in hand not the paintbrush but the more familiar needle and thread. Sewing is an activity filled with quiet thoughts and feelings. This is true whether one sews for one’s family in bliss or solitude, or joyfully for oneself. Then, the clothing born from that time has a power to communicate the personality of the wearer. Works created as an extension of everyday life often express fleeting, complex feelings hard to define. In our encounters with them, “we” viewers may find ourselves experiencing emotions we have been little conscious of before. This exhibition of works by five artists in our collection and four guest artists—nine women artists in all—will look at handcrafted work in connection with art and ponder the issue of gender.
… -
- Past
Aperto 04
Nerhol Promenade
2016.5.21(Sat.) - 2016.8.28(Sun.)
The artist duo Nerhol was born from a chance encounter between IIDA Ryuta, who creates sculptural works using paper and print media, and TANAKA Yoshihisa, who explores visual information as a graphic designer. As a collaboration, they view paper—a distribution product consumed daily in great volumes—from different perspectives, as a physical object and as an image. The paper sculptures they create inscribed with large quantities of images possess a distinctive three-dimensionality that strikes a deep impression in viewers. In this exhibition, “Promenade,” Nerhol will present their new series, “multiple–roadside tree,” along with new works employing mirror-paper. Their “multiple-roadside tree” is produced by cutting round slices from roadside trees, little by little, photographing each slice, then greatly enlarging the photos, bundling them, and inscribing them. “Promenade” will perceive the entire art museum as place for strolling. By walking, visitors will activate the artworks, which present varying impression depending on the angle or distance from which they are viewed. YAMAMINE Junya Assistant Curator, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
… -
- Past
SUPERFLEX One Year Project ― THE LIQUID STATE
2016.4.29(Fri.) - 2017.3.12(Sun.)
SUPERFLEX is an artists’ group based in Copenhagen, Denmark composed of Rasmus Nielsen, Jakob Fenger, and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen. While referencing existing social systems and frameworks, SUPERFLEX engages the community and constructs proposals for new kinds of public space. This time, the artists will view 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa as a petri dish and undertake a one year project of elucidating the museum’s relationship with its community, using three keywords—“cultivation,” “fermentation,” and “tramsformation.”
… -
- Past
Xijing Men “Xijing Is Not Xijing, Therefore Xijing Is Xijing.”
2016.4.29(Fri.) - 2016.8.28(Sun.)
“Xijing” is a fictitious city-state. In 2007, the three artists, OZAWA Tsuyoshi (born in 1965 and currently residing in Saitama Prefecture), CHEN Shaoxiong (born in 1962 and currently residing in Beijing) and Gimhongsok (born in 1964 and currently residing in Seoul) formed a collaboration team called “Xijing Men” meaning people who come from Xijing. The team started a project which tells the story of a city-state somewhere in Asia that is not Beijing, Tokyo or Seoul where art-loving people reside. The story of Xijing can be interpreted as a story irradiating modern society, not just a story of a fictitious state removed from reality. Here, out of their works, we proudly present Chapter 3: Welcome to Xijing- Xijing Olympics/ Xijing Winter Olympics, Chapter 4: I Love Xijing - The Daily Life of Xijing Presidents, and Chapter 5: Xijing is NOT Xijing; their latest work. Furthermore, out of the latest works created independently by each of these three artists of a generation living in the same age, we introduce works including installations which confront historic incidents and include philosophical considerations, project images, paintings and performances.
… -
- Past
Aperto 03
SAKANO Mitsunori : VISIBLE BREATH
2016.1.30(Sat.) - 2016.5.8(Sun.)
This exhibition will present Visible Breath (2012) by SAKANO Mitsunori, a video installation work employing five screens. Sakano was born in Tsurugi in Hakusan city, Ishikawa prefecture in 1977 and raised there. Today, he is a practicing Tokyo-based video artist. Sakano studied art and video production at the University of East London and, on his return, embarked on the creation of video artworks. Increasingly, his interest has turned to the festivals and other traditions of his native Tsurugi. Visible Breath is the culmination of his investigations into that world. The work takes iron production as its motif, an industry through which Tsurugi (pronounced the same as tsurugi, the word for sword) had commerce with Izumo(Shimane Prefecture, Japan) and the Korean peninsula in ancient times. Sakano has imbued Tsurugi’s traditions with his own interpretations to create a work of fictional content that activates the imaginations of viewers. WASHIDA Meruro (Curator, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa)
… -
- Past
A Centennial Exhibition
INOUE Yuichi
2016.1.2(Sat.) - 2016.3.21(Mon.)
A Centennial Exhibition: INOUE Yuichi will be a large-scale retrospective marking the birth 100 years ago of Inoue Yuichi (1916-1985), one of Japan’s most important postwar artists. Inoue Yuichi is among the few Japanese contemporary artists to win broad international acclaim in the postwar years. Taking the ink and paper of calligraphy tradition as his expressive medium, Inoue became a pioneering voice in the postwar Japanese art scene. This exhibition will go to the core of Inoue’s art through more than 200 of his most notable works from his early to late periods. From his 1955 “Work” series, the exhibition will present examples of Inoue’s abstract calligraphy, created in response to abstract expressionism. It will also display his foremost early-period work Gutetsu, submitted in the 1957 São Paulo Art Biennial, and works of the 1960s such as Kō (Fond), Haha (Mother), and Kaze (Wind) created using innovative materials and methods of his own invention, such as glue and frozen ink. The exhibition will then move to Inoue works of the 1970s that reflect the mind in accord with lifestyle, such as Hin (Poverty), and final period works of the late 1970s and ‘80s, such as Tori (Bird), Tsuki (Moon), Fun (Behead), and Taka (Hawk) which construct an increasingly rich world. The exhibition will highlight the varying styles for which Inoue is known, his single-character calligraphy, needless to say, but also his multi-character pieces recalling his experience of the horror of war, Tokyo-daikūshū (Tokyo Bombing) and Ah Yokokawa Kokumin-gakkō (Ah, Yokokawa National School!) His kotobagaki (word works) in which he spoke the word as part of the creative action will also be featured: works such as Kaeru Tanjō-sai and Yodaka-no-hoshi rendered in conté pencil, pencil, or carbon. The exhibition will conclude with works of Inoue’s late years undertaken amid his struggle with illness. These include Nametokoyama no Kuma (The Bears of Nametoko Mountain) and his free-hand copies (rinsho) of the classics Yan Qingli Stele and Jō (Above), as well as his final piece, Kokoro (Mind). Through works representing every stage his career, the exhibition will explore the world of free, unconventional calligraphy to which Inoue Yuichi remained committed throughout his life. Exhibition curator: AKIMOTO Yuji Director, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
… -
- Past
Collection 2 History, Regrowth, and Future
2015.11.28(Sat.) - 2016.5.8(Sun.)
The Collection 1 exhibition, this fiscal year, provided opportunities to question and explore what is for us the world of “now.” In continuation, Collection 2 envisions our “future” through artworks recently acquired by this museum and by freshly interpreting its existing collection. What is contemporary art’s potential in the 21st century when social values are rapidly changing in every region of Japan as in every nation of the world? In an exhibition organized into the themes “History” and “Regrowth,” we invite viewers to join us in imagining the road before us. In continuation from last year, furthermore, the exhibition “Awazu Kiyoshi: Makurihirogeru (EXPOSE) 2” will be held concurrently with the Collection exhibition.
… -
- Past
HIROMURA Masaaki Junglin’ in Kanazawa Indistinct Landscapes
2015.11.21(Sat.) - 2016.5.8(Sun.)
“Beauty” and “contemplation” are qualities that design implies and they both offer ideas in solving various problems. Now the role of design is expanding together with the field of design itself. The future becomes visible by looking at the essence of things from the periphery¬—the designer Masaaki Hiromura reinterprets the landscape of Kanazawa through design thinking. “Junglin’” is a series of video installations which originally began in 2010. This year, we present “Junglin’ in Kanazawa/Indistinct Landscapes”. A familiar scene can be easily obscured into an unexpected image by a slight shift of perspective. What appears in front of you is a fresh form, transporting you away from conventional symbols of everyday life to a somewhat primitive perception of your surrounding. How do we usually perceive landscapes and what is overlooked?
… -
- Past
The Contemporary 3
BCL Ghost in the Cell
2015.9.19(Sat.) - 2016.3.21(Mon.)
Does Information Possess Life?—Fusing Biotechnology and Art The artist collective BCL has won international attention with such projects as storing a family’s DNA inside the DNA of a tree to create a “living memorial” or else releasing genetically modified flowers into the natural environment. This time, by giving DNA and cells to Miku Hatsune—a humanoid persona, voiced by a singing synthesizer application, who is known worldwide as a representative of Japanese pop culture—BCL will explore contemporary Japan’s unique imaginative power, which continually travels between life and non-life, art and entertainment, and individual and collaborative creation.
… -
- Past
Aperto 02
KASHIO Satomi : Something That Dwells Inside Life
2015.9.19(Sat.) - 2016.1.17(Sun.)
Forms Filled with Life Force by Textile Artist Kashio Satomi. This exhibition “KASHIO Satomi : Something That Dwells Inside Life” is the second in the Aperto Series introducing cutting edge young artists in a solo exhibition format. Building on Japanese dyeing traditions, particularly those of Kaga Yûzen, Kashio Satomi creates intricately detailed expression through methods that include silkscreen and brushing on colors. Incorporating such everyday motifs as planes and cogwheels, the images in her works are characterized by geometric decorativeness, while also evoking thoughts of living cells. Creating three-dimensional forms through the layering and combining of sheets of fabric, what emerge are forms replete with an organic sense of life force. This exhibition introduces ceiling hangings in tune with their display space developed by Kashio since 2014. UCHIRO Hiroyuki (Curator, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa)
… -
- Past
The Contemporary 2
Who interprets the world?
2015.9.19(Sat.) - 2015.12.13(Sun.)
In 2015, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa is holding a series of exhibitions, entitled “The Contemporary,” presenting contemporary artworks that offer insight into today’s world. “The Contemporary 1—In Our Time: Art in Post-Industrial Japan,” held this spring and summer, featured artworks by 10 artists and artist groups highly visible on the contemporary scene since 2000. It took four keywords important for understanding Japanese art today—“relationship,” “everyday,” “media,” and “vernacular.” Next, our autumn and winter exhibition, “The Contemporary 2: Who interprets the world?” asks how contemporary artists rooted in different cultures see and convey the state of the larger world beyond their community. In contemporary society, where “displace” and “crossover” cultures is becoming the normal state, relationships of all kinds are made fluid. Historical perspectives and social values taken for granted until now obtain new meanings, depending on who is doing the interpreting. This exhibition views the diverse artworks born explosively, particularly from regions peripheral to Japan, as “practices for living.” It examines how people living in the same age as we, yet in different time-zones and locations, look at the world. Works of art are created by freely combining a wide range of materials and methods. They are unique and ambiguous and cannot be reduced to signs interpretable using simple A-B-C or other codes. An individual work is the product of the artist’s words and actions, something both deeply personal and collective. We might say that it expresses the artist’s conscious of the world with which the artists come to grips. What, then, should be our approach to creative expression produced in a different arena informed by a different cultural context? Following the postcolonial critique of the Western Europe-centered historical perspective that prevailed through the latter half of the 20th century, many artists are engaged in taking back the act of interpretation, to seek proper understanding of their works in their own languages instead of words and gestures borrowed from the West. With meanings from different cultures mingled together from innumerable different directions, we must be careful to note that who interprets them can profoundly change those meanings. A space in which visitors can create new empathetic links, Who interprets the world? is an exhibition devoted to artistic expression rooted in different perspectives, an experiment in using culture (works of art) to interpret our world. Hiromi Kurosawa, Chief Curator 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa *Our exhibition title Who interprets the world? is a translation of the title of the book “Qui traduit le monde?” edited and prefaced by Majima Ichiro. (Jimbun Shoin 2005).
… -
- Past
Collection 1 Where you meet with narratives
2015.5.26(Tue.) - 2015.11.15(Sun.)
Looking at the world scene “today (now),” Collection 1 endeavors to reinterpret the collection compiled by the museum over the past decade. In the 21st century, when artists of the world’s unique regional cultures bring increasing diversity to our society, what kind of potential lies in their artworks? This exhibition will look at the world from an inter-cultural standpoint, primarily through works in our collection.
… -
- Past
The Contemporary 1
In Our Time: Art in Post-industrial Japan
2015.4.25(Sat.) - 2015.8.30(Sun.)
In any era, the definition of "contemporary" changes as time goes by. Already, 10 years have passed since this museum opened with a mission to present contemporary art, and hence, we are taking this occasion—our 10th anniversary—to look freshly at art now. Under the theme "The Contemporary," we will hold three exhibitions. The first, "In Our Time: Art in Post-industrial Japan," will focus on Japan and feature 10 artists and artist groups principally active since 2000. The exhibition's KeyWords—"everyday," "vernacular," "relationship," and "media." Today, Japan has achieved a transition from an industrial society producing cars and buildings to a post-industrial society providing services and information. New problems have also emerged—an aging population and declining birthrate, the hollowing out of rural regions, and growing numbers of solitary deaths. To alleviate or resolve such problems, attempts are being made to build "relationship" among people and to rediscover the attractive features of rural "vernacular." Meanwhile, it has become an age of proliferating personal media, characterized by smart-phones and "always-on connection" to online social networking. Through works by 10 artists and artist groups who live and work in these times, we explore the art of now.
… -
- Past
ARCHITECTURE FOR DOGS
2014.12.6(Sat.) - 2015.5.10(Sun.)
ARCHITECTURE FOR DOGS—an earnest architectural project for the happiness of dogs and people alike—looks at architecture from a canine scale and explores new potentials in architecture. Planning & direction: HARA Kenya Co-Foundes by Imprint Venture Lab Participating architects: Atelier Bow-Wow, ITO Toyo, MVRDV, KUMA Kengo, Konstantin GRCIC, SEJIMA Kazuyo, Torafu Architects, NAITO Hiroshi, BAN Shigeru, FUJIMOTO Sou, Reiser + Umemoto, Hara Design Institute, and HARA Kenya
… -
- Past
Architecture since 3.11
2014.11.1(Sat.) - 2015.5.10(Sun.)
As a special exhibition marking its 10th anniversary, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa will hold an exhibition, “Architecture since 3.11,” exploring new architectural trends in Japan since the 3.11 disaster. The 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami forced architects to fundamentally rethink their understanding of architecture and society’s systems. What role will be demanded of architects hereafter, and what kind of future should they envision? Including such perspectives as energy and environment within its scope, the exhibition will look at architecture since 2011 through the endeavors of 25 architectural offices and ponder the architect’s role.
… -
- Past
Japan Architects 1945-2010
2014.11.1(Sat.) - 2015.3.15(Sun.)
As a special exhibition marking its 10th anniversary, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa is collaborating with the Centre Pompidou (Paris) in holding exhibition of post-war Japanese architecture, “Japan Architects 1945-2010” taking the Centre Pompidou’s collection of works and materials as a core. Mr. Migayrou has divided the 65-year period from 1945 to 2010 into six sections and color-coded each section’s concept. His compelling vantage point on post-war Japanese architecture will be another exhibition highlight. Architects played a major role in Japan’s national project of reconstructing from the ruins of war. Adhering to the principles of modernism or, in some cases, pursing an essentially Japanese style, they designed and constructed public facilities and buildings of all kinds. As they did so, the architects gradually expanded their focus from architecture to urban design, and in the 1960s, the architectural movement “Metabolism” was born, impelled by new economic and technological development. This movement reached its apogee at the 1970 Osaka Exposition and thereafter diversified, further evolved, and formed a new vision. A younger generation of architects inherited its aims, but already a minimalist style of architecture—what might be called “architecture of elimination”—was sweeping the nation. Then, in the late 1990s, after the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy and the Kobe Earthquake, works appeared that re-examined architecture from the perspectives of “narrative” and “program,” and many Japanese architects rose to international acclaim. This exhibition offers a precious opportunity to follow the tracks of the Japanese architects who, swinging between Western modernism and Japanese identity, created their own style and vision and garnered international attention. The great number of works and materials—over 240 original drawings and models by some 80 architects who spear-headed the development of post-war Japanese architecture—are invaluable tools for understanding these architects’ conceptual and design processes. All together, they form an architecture exhibition of a scale never before seen in Japan. It is an exhibition of importance—not only for the light it casts on architectural history but also for the deep insight it offers into Japan’s rapidly changing post-war society.
… -
- Past
SUZUKI Yasuhiro’s Mitate Laboratory
2014.9.13(Sat.) - 2014.11.24(Mon.)
"This reminds me something else," we often wonder to ourselves. The technique of representing one object with another is called mitate. Yasuhiro Suzuki likens a boat’s wake to a zipper or the ball of a kendama cup-and-ball to an apple and, in this way, rediscovers familiar objects and phenomena from his own perspective. The artworks he creates using this technique help open up our perceptions of the world. This autumn, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa is holding a "project exhibit" of mitate theme. The exhibit will occasion a fresh look at the art museum and around Kanazawa.
… -
- Past
APERTO 1
KIM Mitsuo White light White heat
2014.9.13(Sat.) - 2014.11.24(Mon.)
“Aperto,” a new series, takes a solo exhibition format to highlight up-and-coming young artists and examine new trends in the making. “KIM Mitsuo: White light White heat” is the inaugural exhibition in this series. Kim Mitsuo employs silk-screen techniques to explore the relationship between serial images and the image they produce as a total effect. Spreading a thin layer of paraffin wax on a board, he transfers an ink image to the wax using silk screen. He then exposes the surface to heat and melts the wax, halting the process to let it harden just before the image disappears entirely. The ink portions that melt along with the wax return to an unfigured state and remain as spaces of emptiness. Although a two-dimensional work, its surface is disturbed by projections of the wax and shows the traces of Kim’s own physical actions. The indistinct, broken lines of a fence or chair form an ambiguous boundary, causing us to sense another world of light beyond. While giving play to the qualities of his materials and techniques, Kim implies that opposing phenomena exist in the same world and gives visual embodiment to a situation in which the essential spirit of what we expect to see is missing. Yumiko Tatematsu (Curator, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa)
… -
- Past
Awazu Kiyoshi : Makurihirogeru(EXPOSE)1
Art Running Wild: AWAZU Kiyoshi and Performance
2014.9.13(Sat.) - 2014.10.13(Mon.)
The laws of causality in landscapes and objects, chance encounters. Chance operation. That is what I think people are seeing. “Art Running Wild,” Awazu Kiyoshi (from Zokei Shiko Noto, p.112) After World War II, in a Tokyo that had turned into a wasteland, Awazu Kiyoshi (1929-2009) taught himself painting, using films and art magazines as his textbooks, by sketching passengers on the Yamanote Line trains and people in the street. In 1955, after winning the Japan Advertising Artists Club Award for his poster Umi wo Kaese (Give Our Sea Back), he adopted and expanded the reproduction and mass production of images through design and printing technology as the object of his expression, saying, "In all expressive fields, I resolve to remove not only the boundaries among forms of expression; I will remove class, category, disparity and the hierarchies that have appeared in art," and crossing a variety of genres, continued to challenge himself to experimental forms of expression. Awazu’s work appeared in posters, publications and architecture, and spread throughout the city. He participated in "Metabolism" in 1960, and in Expoland and the Japanese pavilion concept plan for Expo ’70 in Osaka. The font design for Japan’s motorway signage is also attributable to Awazu. Some 2,786 works by Awazu Kiyoshi have been gifted to the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa since 2006 from the Awazu Design Room. The exhibition "Graphism in the Wilderness" held at the museum in 2007 presented 1,750 works, but there are a large number of previously unshown works, materials and notes, among other things that provide clues about his creative process and experimental activities, which even now are being researched and studied. Starting this year, a series titled "Makurihirogeru(EXPOSE)" will present the world of Awazu Kiyoshi, from a multi-dimensional perspective, including work never shown before. The first exhibition will focus on , a series produced between 1977 and 1979 by the artist HAMADA Goji, in which Awazu participated and created three original performances. Hamada later said, "I think the fact that art has transcended or disconnected from social systems and global significance is the single thing art can boast about. When this is denied, it makes me want to fight. For me, it is because the whole thing is synonymous with performance." * This exhibition will be staged from this perspective and put into practice the pioneering spirit of Awazu Kiyoshi who dismantled the existing hierarchy, together with artists who are active in various fields today. KITADE Chieko, Exhibition Curator 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa * "Interview with Hamada Goji, Guzen wo torikomi, katachi no nai mono no chikara wo shinjite" (Capturing chance and believing in the power of formless things); Kitagawa Fram, Aato no chikaku hendo (The diastrophism of art), Bijutsu Shuppansha, 2013, p. 116.
… -
- Past
Collection Exhibition II EXPOSURE | FIXING
2014.9.13(Sat.) - 2014.10.13(Mon.)
The Museum, to mark its 10th anniversary and give visitors opportunity to rediscover its contemporary appeal, will focus on photographic works among the works of wide-ranging media in the collection.
… -
- Past
HASHIMOTO Masaya “Awai naru mono”
2014.5.24(Sat.) - 2014.8.31(Sun.)
In his work, HASHIMOTO Masaya has critically and exhaustively examined the distinctive “concern for materials and techniques” that permeates all Japanese art. This exhibition will present two important series of works by Hashimoto.
… -
- Past
Leandro ERLICH −The Ordinary?
2014.5.3(Sat.) - 2014.8.31(Sun.)
Swimming Pool, a familiar work at this museum, and Leandro Erlich’s first solo exhibition in Japan. Leandro Erlich (born in Buenos Aires in 1973; resides in Montevideo, Uruguay) is, to the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, a very special artist. His The Swimming Pool, a work familiar to many as “Leandro’s Pool,” has played a particularly large role at this museum, which was designed by SANAA / Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa. Amid the many creative modes that seemed almost to well up from the early 1990s on, his style, which creates changes in our perception of reality through objects and actions everyone can share, can be identified as one of the sustained characteristics of contemporary art. The Swimming Pool spurs on the viewer’s awareness of the problematic by taking something ordinary, a pool, and turning it into the extraordinary in combination with new and unknown elements. By intervening boldly in our everyday lives, brilliantly reflecting our states in response to the existence of those things, and adding both approachability and casualness, he encourages the habit of making a full body response when people face his works and receive the full, uninhibited force of his creativity. His are, without a doubt, works of art that have contributed greatly to people’s growing love for contemporary art. This exhibition, his first solo exhibition in Japan, will exhibit seventeen of his latest works, in addition to The Swimming Pool. We are delighted to be able to hold it in 2014, the tenth anniversary of the opening of this museum. We hope you will take this opportunity to enjoy the creative world of Leandro Erlich, whose work always proposes a place of rapport, open and free. (Hiromi Kurosawa, Curator 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa)
… -
- Past
Taste of Curiosity ― Museum of Curiosity food creation + The University Museum, The University of Tokyo
2014.4.26(Sat.) - 2015.3.31(Tue.)
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa will mark its 10th anniversary on October 9 this year. On this occasion, we are holding "Taste of Curiosity – Museum of Curiosity"—a program to create a "banquet" site for celebrating our 10 years with everyone. The program is being led by food creation / SUWA Ayako—a project to propose new values for the enjoyment of food—and The University Museum, The University of Tokyo, which will create a "The Chambers of Curiosities." The program will be an unprecedented art museum event, taking "taste" as a theme in harkening back to the original impulse behind the museum concept—curiosity. Already, more than 50 "Foodstuffs of Curiosity" have been gathered, and over 400 people will take part in "Experiences of Taste." The program will develop in stages toward an exciting climax as a "banquet."
… -
- Past
NAKAMURA Yoshifumi "Come on-a my Hut!"
2014.4.26(Sat.) - 2014.8.31(Sun.)
Nakamura Yoshifumi has consistently made houses that are in tune with the lifestyles of his clients and snug like a set of everyday clothes. This exhibition uses the idea of the hut, a form that has captivated Nakamura since he was a child and which serves as the model for his residential buildings, as a medium for re-addressing the question, "What is a dwelling?" In the Long-term Project Space we will introduce seven huts that have captivated Nakamura over many years along with projects ranging from huts to small residential buildings designed by Nakamura himself. In addition, in the courtyard we will display a full-scale version of a "single-person" hut designed by Nakamura. This hut incorporates many of the features Nakamura has been experimenting with in his own hut in a quest for energy self-sufficiency in a dwelling reduced in size to the bare minimum. It is at once a comfortable living space with the warmth that all individually made things have and a vision of a future society and way of living in response to the energy and environmental problems that confront us, particularly in the wake of 3/11.
… -
- Past
Collection Exhibition I TRANSPARENCY | REFLECTION
2014.4.12(Sat.) - 2014.9.21(Sun.)
"Collection Exhibition I TRANSPARENCY | REFLECTION" looks at the properties of "transparency and reflection" in the context of their use in artworks, such as sculptural works that employ materials transparent to light or light reflecting, a self-portrait in the form of the artist's reflection, or photographic images acquired through a lens. Transparent materials and highly polished surfaces have fascinated people since ancient times. As concepts, "transparency and reflection" repeatedly come up in art, as well, such as when artworks are likened to windows or mirrors. The physical effects produced by highly transparent materials and mirror techniques can greatly surprise us or be a source of fun and enjoyment, and what we see when peering through these artworks or gazing into their reflections can change our visual channel and induce new thinking. Later, after viewing this exhibition, when you walk through our museum once again, what kind of images do you see reflected in the museum’s circular glass wall or large transparent doors? What scenery opens to you from beyond them? (NAKATA Koichi, Curator, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa)
… -
- Past
Philosophical Fashion 3: mintdesigns "happy people"
2013.12.7(Sat.) - 2014.5.18(Sun.)
"Philosophical Fashion"—a series inquiring into the meaning of clothing today, when trends change with dizzying speed, driven by the phenomenal rise of "fast fashion." Featured in this series are creators who consistently propose new fashions on the basis of an enduring concept. Our third exhibit in this series looks at "mintdesigns." Fashion brand mintdesigns is known for clothing designs that give play to unique textiles developed by the brand’s creators, Hokuto Katsui and Nao Yagi. Besides fashion, mintdesigns actively pursues collaborations in other fields, such as dinner ware, furniture, and Japanese confections, so its design territory is continually expanding. Not stopping at clothing, Katsui and Yagi seek to impart richness to our everyday lives through product design. Their activities, as such, explore the possibilities of "fashion" far beyond what is "fashionable." This exhibit will take "happy people" as its theme in an experimental endeavor to deploy mintdesign clothing actively in everyday life. People living in Tokyo and Kanazawa will encounter mintdesigns in their own everyday spaces, and the moment of their encounter will be displayed. HIRABAYASHI Megumi, Curator
… -
- Past
Koji Kakinuma – Exploring Calligraphy
2013.11.23(Sat.) - 2014.3.2(Sun.)
Calligrapher Koji Kakinuma—born in 1970, lives and works in Tokyo. At five years old he took up the brush, first under father, Suiryu Kakinuma, and later Yukei Teshima and Ichijo Uematsu. Asking "Is Shodo art? Am I an artist?" Kakinuma has continually pushed the boundaries of Shodo, the Japanese art of calligraphy. Kakinuma brings to Shodo a contemporary vision grounded in tradition. He probes the principle of calligraphy in an endeavor to see calligraphy as a contemporary art form. "Inhale, exhale—use the brush freely!" is the figure of calligraphy he aspires to. Kakinuma’s expressive style takes many forms. "Rinsho" (brushing after a model) is a platform for dialogue with master calligraphers and people of the ancient past. "Encounters"—an offshoot of Rinsho—are his interpretations of others’ words in the Kakinuma style. His "super-large-scale works" are pictorial investigations using charcoal ink. Then, there is "performance," where he shares the creative process with an audience, "trancework"—countless repetitions of simple, powerful phrases, and "installations" that give temporal and spatial development to calligraphy on grand scale. The calligraphy of Koji Kakinuma is thus an "art of today" that draws from calligraphy, contemporary art, and sub-culture. It is calligraphy of hope that looks to tomorrow. It is calligraphy of possibility, free and open to the future. This exhibition will present the world of Koji Kakinuma through some 700 of his foremost works. AKIMOTO Yuji, Exhibition Curator Director, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
… -
- Past
Borderline Collection Exhibition II
2013.9.28(Sat.) - 2014.3.16(Sun.)
We differentiate between the internal and external in many different situations. Our interior is formed on the basis of common rules such as language, physical characteristics and memory, and friction and discord frequently arise between inside and out. Yet we find new rules for the internal and external, negotiating on the boundaries, which are continually being updated. Thus we could describe a border as a territory harboring the potential to expand the interior. This year's Collection Exhibition is an attempt from this standpoint to change our view of borderlines from one of division, to one of connection and expansion. "Borderline Collection Exhibition I" took as its basis that which is most familiar to us – the body – and pondered the relationship between inside and out. "Borderline Collection Exhibition II" expands this to include social borders, in a showcase of works from the Museum’s collection. Having come to possess through the evolutionary process a massive cerebrum, homo sapiens also acquired the inner realm that is consciousness. Various borderlines exist in our society: between the self and others, national borders, and gender, to name just a few, but in most cases no actual line has been drawn. Rather a line has been drawn by people in their consciousness, and subsequently become institutionalized. Through the work of eight artists, at times confronting the borderlines created by human consciousness, at times traversing them, this exhibition explores the potential for people to expand the inner realm that is the self through contact with the outside, via borders. YONEDA Seiko, Curator, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
… -
- Past
Fiona Tan — Ellipsis
2013.8.3(Sat.) - 2013.11.10(Sun.)
Fiona Tan was born in 1966 in Pekan Baru, on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. She now lives and works in Amsterdam.The daughter of a Chinese father and an Australian mother, she lived in Australia before moving to Europe. Having lived in different cultures as a child, she recognizes within herself a multilayered complexity rooted in that history. Her 1997 film May You Live in Interesting Times depicts the flight of her own family from anti-Chinese violence in Indonesia and highlights her identity as an artist who is herself a symbol for multicultural lives. Tan’s tranquil images reveal the continuing pursuit of difference in works with wide appeal around the world. In recent years she has turned to the use of fragmentary images, articulating a variety of meanings through techniques of montage and restructuring that convey the ambiguities of memory. While each photograph and video image is shot with a steady hand, their failure to convey the true meaning or facts of what they portray compels viewers to speculate, probing deeply into their own memories, and making the images themselves unforgettable. In this exhibition, we present works that range from Linnaeus’ Flower Clock (1998) from Tan’s early period to the more recent Rise and Fall (2009) and Seven (2011), in which lines and voices intersecting in discontinuous time are woven together to create one of art’s most compelling stories.
… -
- Past
Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan “In-Habit: Project Another Country”
2013.8.3(Sat.) - 2013.11.10(Sun.)
In-Habit by Maria Isabel Gaudinez-Aquilizan and Alfredo Juan Aquilizan is a large-scale installation: a home made of cardboard, caught up in the flow of production and consumption. It is modeled on the homes of the Badjao, a people who live on the coast of Sabah, located on the island of Borneo. Traditionally, the Badjao live on boats or on houses built on high platforms in coastal shallows. They spend their floating lives in intimate connection with the sea. In recent years, however, waves of globalization have led to visible changes in their way of life. Via the Badjao, the artists provide an overview of life in contemporary Asia, as new values sustained by both economic and cultural globalization have led to a growing awareness of the danger that Asia confronts a critical turning point. Maria Isabel Gaudinez-Aquilizan and Alfredo Juan Aquilizan were born in the Philippines and now live and work in Australia, but have now returned to their roots with their project Another Country, in which they pose the questions, “Where do we live?” and “How do we live?” This exhibition provides an opportunity to reconsider how our once taken for granted freedom to live where and how we like is threatened by rapid change.
… -
- Past
Philosophical Fashion 2: ANREALAGE "A COLOR UN COLOR"
2013.7.12(Fri.) - 2013.11.24(Sun.)
"Philosophical Fashion"—a series inquiring into the meaning of clothing today, when trends change with dizzying speed, driven by the phenomenal rise of "fast fashion." Featured in this series are creators who consistently propose new fashions on the basis of an enduring concept. Our second exhibit of this series looks at "ANREALAGE," a fashion brand that has captured attention with conceptual designs reflecting a truly unique vision of the body and clothing, distinguished by scrupulous attention to detail in the making. ANREALAGE takes "real," "unreal" and "age" as its concept. MORINAGA Kunihiko, the brand’s designer, analyzes the "real" of everyday life we are ordinarily unaware of. Abstracting the "unreal" from that reality, he applies unreal fantasies to his conception of clothing. Morinaga’s methods are astonishing and time-consuming—a suit sewn with 5,000 buttons or a patchwork jacket made of several hundred fabric pieces. His approach is distinguished by conceptual "form"—clothing fitted to spheres, triangular pyramids, squares, and human bodies of odd proportions. He works, then, in a spirit of experimentation using cutting-edge technologies—exceedingly sensitive "laser cut" fabric cutting, for instance, and threads and dyes that change color in response to sunlight. Morinaga pursues the essence of fashion within close observation of his age. Although his designs are always met with surprise, his aim is not to produce Morinaga "creations." Rather, by reducing "creations" to wearable "products" of the ANREALAGE brand, he draws consumers into involvement and seeks to penetrate society and the times. Morinaga’s theme this time—A COLOR UN COLOR. His inquiry into color, as a fashion designer, he will unfold in the space of a transparent gallery. HIRABAYASHI Megumi, Curator
… -
- Past
Shimabuku: Noto
2013.4.27(Sat.) - 2014.3.2(Sun.)
Shimabuku travels the world, creating artworks that examine how people live and communicate. For this long-term project lasting one year, Shimabuku is traveling to Noto to satisfy his curiosity about its unusual customs and products. Then, based on what he discovers there from his unique artistic perspective, he is creating new artworks. The project is the 7th undertaking of the “Kanazawa Youth Dream Challenge Art Programme,” which offers young people from Kanazawa and other regions opportunities to work together with artists. As such, it has already (since April) seen some 28 “volunteer members” visit Noto with Shimabuku and return to recreate their discoveries there, in a museum gallery. From September 28, the artist is exhibiting the new works he has created with the members. Workshops and other events are also being held with Noto and this museum as a stage. Visitors to the exhibition will be freshly moved by Shimabuku’s unique perspective on Noto, so that they look anew at things all around them.
… -
- Past
Visceral Sensation — Voices So Far, So Near
2013.4.27(Sat.) - 2013.9.1(Sun.)
Our organs contain life memory and life rhythms from the far distant past, according to anatomist MIKI Shigeo (1925-1987). Miki’s observations of human behavior, senses, and emotions have profoundly influenced diverse fields. This exhibition will ponder Miki’s views and take “visceral sensation”—the most primeval and fundamental of the human senses—as an aid to appreciating contemporary artworks that converse with the voices of life within us and induce new perceptual awakenings. Featured will be 13 artists and artist collaboratives from Japan and abroad: Louise BOURGEOIS, CHO Shinta, Nathalie DJURBERG & Hans BERG, KATO Izumi, KUSAMA Yayoi, Ana MENDIETA, NAKAGAWA Yukio, Saskia OLDE WOLBERS, OLTA, Pipilotti RIST, SHIGA Lieko, Bill VIOLA, and WATANABE Kikuma. All, as artists, consciously or unconsciously explore the sensations, perceptions, and emotions emanating from our primordial physical embodiment, or respond to the life rhythms resonating silently in our organs, the axis of our physical being. Working in painting, sculpture, photography, video, picture books, architecture, installation, and performance, they manifest these inner voices in their artworks. Today, when our fears of environmental and socio-economic collapse are becoming real—as demonstrated by the anxiety and discomfort we have known, concerning radiation, since the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and nuclear power plant disaster—what do we feel in our bodies; what are our bodies saying? This exhibition will be a place where visitors, prompted by the sensations they experience in their encounter with each artwork, will tune into, feel, and ponder the “voices so far, so near” that speak within and around them as people of an uncertain age. YOSHIOKA Emiko, Curator 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
… -
- Past
Borderline Collection Exhibition I
2013.4.13(Sat.) - 2013.7.15(Mon.)
The sense of strangeness, insecurity, and fear we feel when encountering the unknown. Such feelings come to us as a sign we are about to cross a border. The people with whom we share a language, physical characteristics, rules, and memories we see as “inside” our familiar world, and all others we view as “outside.” Thus, we unconsciously make a distinction and construct a border separating “inside” from “outside.” Borders at times repel the outside, as a threat to the security of the inside, and produce conflict. Yet, a border can also be a fluid territory, continually renewed as inside and outside negotiate and discover new rules. Borders can also tell us how we, ourselves, see the world and people outside. Borders, this is to say, can potentially help us broaden our inside world. Taking such perspectives, our Collection Exhibition this time will reconsider the character of borders, not as a cause of “division” but rather as a means of “connection” and broadening our world. Collection Exhibition I will look at the borders of the body, and Collection Exhibition II, at social and systematic borders. Life forms, human beings included, have an inside enveloped a membrane. By taking materials from outside into their inside, life forms obtain energy and sustain their life. When it comes to our bodies with their complex organs, one part may actually be an outside that is inside, while another part, an inside that is outside. This kind of a structure, where inside and outside develop by reversing themselves, shows us something of the character of a border. In Collection Exhibition I, taking the most familiar example—our bodies—we will use borders as a means to explore human existence and our relationship with the world around us. YONEDA Seiko, Curator, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
… -
- Past
Philosophical Fashion 1: FINAL HOME
2013.1.12(Sat.) - 2013.6.30(Sun.)
“Philosophical Fashion”—a series inquiring into the meaning of clothing today, when trends change with dizzying speed, driven by the phenomenal rise of “fast fashion.” Featured in this series are creators who consistently propose new fashions on the basis of an enduring concept. The first exhibition in the series will examine the project “FINAL HOME” of fashion designer TSUMURA Kosuke. “When people lose their home, their final protection is their clothing.” The nylon coats born from this concept have received the name FINAL HOME. When their many pockets are stuffed with newsprint, the coats provide strong protection against the cold. When filled with emergency goods, they become evacuation jackets. Tsumura first created FINAL HOME in 1994. Since then, Japan has suffered two disasters of unprecedented scale, the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake and Great Eastern Japan Earthquake. Compelled by his mission as a fashion designer, Tsumura has continually pondered the relationships between fashion, society, and the natural environment. Through the activities of FINAL HOME, this exhibition will examine the roles played by clothing and fashion.
… -
- Past
Do Ho Suh -Perfect Home
2012.11.23(Fri.) - 2013.3.17(Sun.)
Through the artist’s re-creation of his private home, the place where his memories and experiences reside, “Do Ho Suh - Perfect Home” will demonstrate how, by traversing the differing territories of contemporary society, Do Ho Suh places people’s values in contrast and underscores their diversity.Do Ho Suh was born in Korea in 1962. After graduating from Seoul National University, he relocated to the US in order to study painting and sculpture. Suh sought to reflect in his artworks the discord he felt between the culture of the United States of America, where he lived as a racial minority, and his own Korean culture. He subsequently achieved worldwide renown with artworks displaying delicacy and precision, in the handling of materials, and simultaneously, qualities of ambiguity and suspension that resonate with the spirit of our times. Suh’s lightweight artworks, which originate in his concept of “carrying a space in a suitcase,” are created using thin, translucent fabrics. In many cases, the fabric is modeled into the form of stairs, corridors, bridges, or gates and represents boundaries between inside and outside, and public and private. For Suh, who lives nomadically, appearing in exhibitions and projects around the world while maintaining bases in London, New York and Seoul, references to “home” are an extension of the inquiry into identity. His works are nevertheless two-sided, however, for his use of plain, monotone fabric erases the specific features of the “Do Ho Suh home,” so that someone’s possession becomes no one’s possession.Through a complete re-creation of Do Ho Suh’s original home, as well as new works adapted for the spaces of this museum, the exhibition will consider what “home” means to Suh. The same “home,” however, when placed in the specific context of Kanazawa, will take on new meanings. Viewers will thus have occasion to see how “home” changes in meaning, depending on its cultural context, and they will feel incentive, accordingly, to ponder what “home” means to them.
… -
- Past
Son et Lumière, et sagesse profonde
2012.9.15(Sat.) - 2013.3.17(Sun.)
On the face of it, it seems that modern civil society has secured freedom and material abundance through economic development, science and technology. In our information-oriented society, speed, comfort, and convenience are regarded both as beneficial and wholesome values. At the same time, however, in order to facilitate the pursuit of these benefits, human life has become more and more regimented. In other words, we are controlled by the institutions and authorities of the society to which we belong. The earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 and the Fukushima nuclear disaster completely undermined the sense of security, happiness, and freedom that form the foundations of society. The economic, social, and other systems that democratic societies have chosen in order to realize human freedom have become threats to the very survival of human society. "Son et Lumière, et sagesse profonde" (Sound and light, and wisdom) explores the potential for humans to confront head on the contradictions in the world and remain standing in the midst of such despair. Some of the artists whose work is on show direct a piercing gaze at human society and bring to light the festering matter. Others embrace despair itself, using methods that can only be described as semi-masochistic to depict individuals who are determined to survive against the odds. Their expression exposes the fabric of a human society that is destitute and helpless. They see in despair the seeds of the future, and in the human condition an existence possessed of a life force that is fleeting yet struggling to survive amidst a maelstrom of suffering and chaos. (KITADE Chieko, curator of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa)
… -
- Past
matohu The Japanese Eye: Finding the Beauty Concealed in Everyday Life
2012.7.21(Sat.) - 2012.11.25(Sun.)
A fresh beauty waits to be discovered—in scenery you pass every day and never give thought to. For the Japanese, beauty was not a transcendental concept but rather a sensitive appreciation of the hidden layers in nature and everyday life. The Japanese Eye means a perspective of “noticing beauty,” fostered through long history. Since debuting in 2005, fashion design brand matohu has stood out at the Tokyo Collection with its distinctive concept of “creating new clothing from traditional Japanese aesthetics.” As of 2010, furthermore, matohu has each season taken up a traditional Japanese aesthetic concept and expressed it in clothing design under the theme, “The Japanese Eye.” The Design Gallery at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa will explore matohu’s rediscovery and expression of Japanese aesthetics through such keywords as kasane (layers), muji (plainness), utsuri (reflection), and yatsushi (to assume a humble appearance). Displayed will be matohu’s most representative collection item, “Nagagi”—clothing of unchanging design that matohu newly produces each season in line with the collection theme. How might traditional Japanese aesthetics be evoked in contemporary lifestyle and a perception of noticing beauty reawakened in our lives? This exhibition will offer a tantalizing glimpse of the answer.
… -
- Past
Aloha Amigo! Federico Herrero x Kazuyuki Sekiguchi
2012.5.3(Thu.) - 2013.3.17(Sun.)
This is the second year (in fact, the sixth year of the project as a whole) of the museum’s three-year plan of “the Kanazawa Youth Dream Challenge Art Programme: Museum as Mediator”(*1). This year’s theme is “the existence of others,”─encounters and dialogues with others as well as one’s inner self through “seeing, hearing, feeling and expressing.” Musicians, who are interested in sound/music expression and relationships with the society and others, are invited to the museum to collaborate with young people, encourage them to experience the pleasure in expressing without being held back by stereotypical ideas. In order to do that, they need to use their five senses, despite the fact that museums are generally regarded as a place for visual arts. Now the museum faces the space-time axes of music expression. Notes: (*1) On “the Kanazawa Youth Dream Challenge Art Programme: Museum as Mediator” Based on the recent study which reports that art museum education is useful for the character formation of young people in their late teens, the project of “the Kanazawa Youth Dream Challenge Art Programme” launched by 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa in 2007 aims to create the museum’s original activities to develop wide-ranging local art and culture encouraging young people, particularly those aged between 18 and 40 including “NEET” (not in education, employment or training) and “FREETER” (permanent part-timer), which are today’s problematic social issues, to participate in social activities. With the keyword “Museum as Mediator,” the programs are to be serialized for three years since 2011 to provide and develop “encounters/dialogues with one’s self, others and society.” As the project aims at phased socialization and globalization, there will be better retention rate of capable personnel and the enhancement of management methods. If we shared our local cultural activities with others internationally, we could promote further exchange of information as well as people, and have bright prospects for the 10th anniversary of this project.
… -
- Past
Collection Exhibition
Son et Lumière – Material, Transition, Time
2012.4.28(Sat.) - 2012.11.4(Sun.)
In light there is darkness, in sound silence. Neither of these pairings are mutually exclusive concepts. Rather in each case the latter is a property inherent in the former. “Son” is the French word for “sound,” “lumière” for “light.” The origins of “son et lumière” can be traced back to an event in France in 1952. Since then the term has come to designate an elaborate outdoor spectacle featuring dramatic sound effects, narration, and lighting projected onto the façade of a famous building or ruin. Once the sun has set, lights pierce the darkness, music swells, and the glitzy and magical scene fills the audience with awe. These presentations impose a rigid uniformity on the place in question, substituting its unique qualities with superficial light and sound effects. In this contemporary age of information overload and excessive energy consumption, we find ourselves at the mercy of mechanical devices that measure and constrain our every waking moment. But once freed from the tyranny of time, our perception is transformed; ordinary phenomena appear before us in fresh and new forms. Beams of light, movements of sound, the waning and waxing of the moon, the patina of age on metal—within these organic temporal spaces, the passage of time is multi-vectored, and each individual experience becomes a journey with an unknowable multiplicity of meanings. This exhibition conceives of the artist as a traveler on this journey and reexamines the world through the prisms of “material,” “transition,” and “time.” In their work, the fourteen artists featured here—Akiyama Yo, Awazu Kiyoshi, Jan Fabre, Peter Fischli David Weiss, Kimura Taiyo, Kishimoto Sayako, Kusama Yayoi, Gordon Matta-Clark, Carsten Nicolai, Gerhard Richter, Saito Makato, Tashima Etsuko, Magnus Wallin, Andy Warhol—impose physical form onto that which is inherently immaterial—the self, images, and actions—through their mastery of the properties and power of materials. Or, put differently, their artistic expression as determined by the materials is manifested to us as a state of motion, launching us on our own unknowable journey. While the stroll through the cosmos of thought that this exhibition affords visitors may indeed be transitory and ephemeral, it will leave each person with a unique and indelible memory.
… -
- Past
Art Crafting towards the Future
2012.4.28(Sat.) - 2012.8.31(Fri.)
“Art Crafting towards the Future” inquires into the contemporary validity of kôgei (Japanese artisan craft) and universalness of its appeal. The exhibition, this is to say, asks: Is kôgei an art genre expressive of our times, capable of speaking to people everywhere? Like other visual media, today’s kôgei is subject to the post-modern trends of the times. Like animation, manga, design, and contemporary art, it is an expressive medium used to create compelling new images. To this end, it employs methods specific to kôgei, and it references kôgei’s historical vision. Yet, today’s kôgei takes a clearly different approach from past kôgei. In its visual imagery, for example, today’s kôgei resonates with animation, manga, design, and contemporary art—genres from which it has previously stood apart. In its attitude towards exhibiting, as well—while exhibit methods differ contingent on the creativity of each artist—today’s kôgei is turned to face the world at large. There is, thus, a clear trend of kôgei artists working in widely varying styles who are showing their works as art of the present day. For this exhibition, I would like to refer to kôgei work of such character as “futurist,” in the sense of “kôgei of a new age” and “future-oriented kôgei.” The exhibits by the 12 featured artists are all kôgei, but I would like viewers to see and enjoy them as today’s art. (Exhibition curator: AKIMOTO Yuji, Director, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa)
… -
- Past
The Creative Power of “Olive” 1982-2003
2012.2.25(Sat.) - 2012.7.1(Sun.)
Olive magazine was highly popular with teenage girls in the 1980s and ‘90s. It was a culture magazine as well as a fashion magazine, and its pages abounded with ideas for richly enjoyable living, and perspectives for creatively personalizing fashions. This exhibition will penetrate to the essence of the magazine through analysis of back numbers and the voices of former readers and people involved in the magazine’s publication.
… -
- Past
The Ossu! Shugeibu and Hideki Toyoshima:
Jiga Daizessan - My Artwork Amazes Me
2011.11.23(Wed.) - 2012.3.20(Tue.)
In today’s society, with its passion for efficiency and ease of understanding, are we not inclined to seek guidelines—even in our creative activities, which by nature should be spontaneous and free? Are we not inclined to seek reasons and standards of evaluation for what to make and how to make it? The “gallant club members” of The Ossu! Shugeibu are men having no handicraft skills or experience, assembled by Bucho (Captain) Shoichi ISHIZAWA, a skilled creator. Proclaiming, “The Untrained Hand is Beautiful!,” they have continuously launched activities that value, above all, the spirit of fun and the individual’s desire to create. Their relaxed, humor-filled Bukatsu workshops, centered on seven core members, nimbly overturn the conventions we all unconsciously associate with handicrafts. Working in design, art, music, and event production, artist Hideki TOYOSHIMA has captured attention with activities that freely traverse genres. Discovering creative opportunities in his encounters with people and places, he creates new events out of relationships arising between things, people, and places. A mediator as well as a creator, he conceives his category-defying activities from his unique perspective as such. In this exhibition, The Ossu! Shugeibu and Hideki Toyoshima will meet for the first time. Toyoshima will interpret the spirit of The Ossu! Shugeibu’s artwork in creating an exhibition space where their activities can unfold.
… -
- Past
Monique Frydman
2011.11.23(Wed.) - 2012.3.20(Tue.)
The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa will present a major individual exhibition of the work of Monique FRYDMAN, an important French woman artist. Frydman has earned a solid reputation through solo exhibitions at many venues, including the Musée Matisse in France, La Verrière, The Hermès Foundation in Belgium, Passage de Retz in France and group shows like “elles @ centrepompidou” at the Centre Georges Pompidou in France. This is the first time she has appeared in an exhibition of this kind in a museum in Japan or any other Asian country. Frydman became a practicing artist in the late 1970s. Taking painting as her main form of expression, she has pursued the expression of color and light with a variety of materials, including canvas, pigment, pastels, and paper. The colors and images that emerge from the intimate and interactive dialogue between the artist’s body and the materials she uses penetrate the space in which the work is placed and adroitly transform the site. The artistic realm that she creates expresses complex aspects of human awareness and emotion and forms connections with our own memories and bodies. In recent years, she has made a number of site-specific installations with such materials as glass, Plexiglas, paper and cloth. In this exhibition, we will present 14 of her works, including three new installations resulting from a dialogue with the architectural space of this museum. Frydman unleashes her unique colors and light in the bright, white space of the museum, leaving mysterious reverberations in the space and in our hearts and minds.
… -
- Past
Vietnamese Artist: Nguyen Phan Chanh Painting Restoration Project
2011.10.22(Sat.) - 2012.2.12(Sun.)
An exhibition introducing a restoration project to preserve the works of NGUYEN Phan Chanh (1892-1984), one of Vietnam’s foremost creators of silk paintings. Japanese artwork restoration techniques were employed to save precious silk paintings by Chanh that were deteriorating. Together with the restored works, a film on the restoration process will be offered, in an attempt to capture the project’s essence.
… -
- Past
Silent Echoes: Collection Exhibition II
2011.9.17(Sat.) - 2012.4.8(Sun.)
How did it come? For a minute the opening balanced from one side to the other. Like a walk or march. Like God strutting in the night. The outside of her was suddenly froze and only that first part of the music was hot inside her heart. She could not even hear what sounded after, but she sat there waiting and froze, with her fists tight. After a while the music came again, harder and loud. It didn’t have anything to do with God. This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. This music was her – the real plain her.1 “Silent Echo: Collection Exhibition II” makes a special presentation of L’echo and Mistelpartition by TSE Su-Mei, an artist born in Luxembourg whose work resonates deeply with the world of music and human life conveyed by the above quote from Carson McCullers’s novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. This exhibition reveals possibilities of the museum collection that have seldom been discussed before. Through selected works from the museum collection, we highlight an artistic world created through a complete fusion of self, technique, and the world, which is exemplified by L’echo and Mistelpartition, artworks based on a process of connecting and blending a wide variety of phenomena related to the body, sound, technique, and the self. This show refers to a new vantage point that has emerged in recent years, a concept that might be called “craft-like formation.” It is based on a new way of evaluating artistic expression, appreciating art and artistic acts developed “as a result of intimate dialogue between makers and their materials, nature, the environment and the other, and the complete immersion of the maker in the process through which objects come into being.”2 We reexamine the art and artistic acts derived from a dialogue with self, other, and material in the work of TSE Su-Mei, Anish KAPOOR, AWAZU Kiyoshi, YAMAZAKI Tsuruko, KUZE Kenji, and KADONAGA Kazuo. Their work shows great strength as well as sensitivity in its quiet dialogues and resonances, telling stories of ways that people engage with and live in this world and revealing new possibilities and hope for living through troubled times. Notes 1. Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Mariner Books, p. 118. 2. FUDO Misato, “In the Process of Becoming”, Alternative Paradise, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, 2005, pp. 8-11. On the recent development of a theory of craft-like formation, see MURATA Daisuke, “Ron Mueck: Form as Dialogue”, Ron Mueck, Foil, 2008; “Anti-Gravity Structure – The Form as ‘History of History’”, Hiroshi Sugimoto: History of History, Shinsozai Kenkyūjo, 2008; “The Form as ‘Knit Cafe in My Room”, “Knit Cafe in My Room” by Mitsuharu Hirose and Minako Nishiyama, 21st Century Museum of Art, Kanazawa, 2009; “What Would Hiroshi Sugimoto Do? What Would Museums Do? Deified Artist and Museum: Hiroshi Sugimoto’s ‘History of History,’” AAS-ISS Joint Conference, 2011 (http://www.asian-studies.org/Conference/index.htm).
… -
- Past
Inner Voices
2011.7.30(Sat.) - 2011.11.6(Sun.)
How does everyone acknowledge their identities that are gradually established in the process of finding out their whereabouts in the world? Among artists of contemporary art who are dealing with various ways of expression while facing contemporary times, women artists indicate explicitly how keen they are on searching for their potential directions while shrugging off restrictions. It is because, when they try to escape from existing values and the old paradigm of reality to create another reality for themselves, it is essential for women to acquire freedom of self-decision---to be free of authority and commonly accepted ideas. Focusing on women artists who were born after the 1960s and rode on the waves of globalization along with the economic growth, this exhibition lends an ear to the Inner Voices of them who see both sides of life---difficulties and possibilities. In order to surmount barriers such as widely accepted images and values of “femininity,” misconceptions and lack of understanding that occur due to differences, they have chosen neither resistance nor confrontation. We are expecting that their works show us the ways they are working will reveal how universally important it is to be free in the expression of art, which is not limited to women only. *Shilpa Gupta, I Keep Falling At You will be displayed from September 10.
… -
- Past
art-ZINE: Booklet - type Art Communication
2011.6.11(Sat.) - 2011.9.25(Sun.)
This exhibition applies the term “art-ZINE”to ZINEs published as a form of art and examines them as a new stage for creative expression. Unlike individually produced artworks, ZINEs are usually published in plural numbers. They are also distinct from the “art book.” As a medium that directly connects the publisher and readers through a personal distribution route, without going through the established book distribution system, the art-ZINE enables new approaches to communication. From this, new possibilities for art expression are also expected to come. Throughout the run of the exhibition, ZINEs gathered through public appeal will be displayed on shelves in the venue. Our aim is to put them out for everyone to look at, as we contemplate together the art-ZINE and its appeal.
… -
- Past
Jeppe Hein 360°
2011.4.29(Fri.) - 2011.8.31(Wed.)
“360°” is the young Danish artist Jeppe Hein’s first solo exhibition at a Japanese art museum. Staged in seven galleries and in corridors, the exhibition offers ten works, including humorous installation works exploring the viewer’s relationship with art. The title, “360°,” while reflecting the Museum’s round design open in all directions, expresses Hein’s wish to draw viewers into involvement, and his desire to awaken new perceptions of spaces by means of artworks in motion using water, mirrors and light. “360°” will be an interactive exhibition offering playful encounters with spaces.
… -
- Past
Silent Echoes: Collection Exhibition I
2011.4.29(Fri.) - 2011.7.18(Mon.)
How did it come? For a minute the opening balanced from one side to the other. Like a walk or march. Like God strutting in the night. The outside of her was suddenly froze and only that first part of the music was hot inside her heart. She could not even hear what sounded after, but she sat there waiting and froze, with her fists tight. After a while the music came again, harder and loud. It didn’t have anything to do with God. This was her, Mick Kelly, walking in the daytime and by herself at night. In the hot sun and in the dark with all the plans and feelings. This music was her – the real plain her. [Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Mariner Books, p. 118.] “Silent Echo: Collection Exhibition I” makes a special presentation of L’écho by TSE Su-Mei, an artist born in Luxembourg whose work resonates deeply with the world of music and human life conveyed by the above quote from Carson McCullers’s novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. This exhibition reveals possibilities of the museum collection that have seldom been discussed before. Through selected works from the museum collection, we highlight an artistic world created through a complete fusion of self, technique, and the world, which is exemplified by L’écho, an artwork based on a process of connecting and blending a wide variety of phenomena related to the body, sound, technique, and the self.
… -
- Past
Peter McDonald: Visitor
2011.4.16(Sat.) - 2012.3.20(Tue.)
With this edition, the Kanazawa Youth Dream Challenge Art Programme (*1) breaks new ground by setting its sights on an overseas artist. The Program invites the young, internationally recognized, UK-based artist Peter McDonald to develop an art project for the first time in Japan, marking the first international edition of the Program. Through the “act of painting,” McDonald, at the core of the project, rubs shoulders with others, lightly traversing the boundary between genres, genders, countries and the everyday and the extraordinary. As young people (*2) participate in the work, they experience the diversity of and possibilities for communication. Beginning with a painting exhibition and the production of a wall installation at the museum, various extemporaneous programs will be held using the exhibition space as a stage. As McDonald interacts with the city and the people of Kanazawa, his painted world will permeate the city, establishing pliable onnections between one person and another, and between people and places through the fundamental language of expression we know as painting. *1. Launched in 2007 adopting the methodology of the Zon Moderna outreach program at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa's unique program takes the form of a long-term project-based exhibition involving an artist-in-residence, work-in-progress and workshops. Targeted mainly at young people 18-39 years of age, participants in the Programme work together to rediscover and to grow their view of themselves and of the world. Based on the results of the past four stagings of the Programme, 2011 marks its further development as a case-study compilation of the Museum's key concept of “museum as mediator”. *2. Participants Wall painting members (active April 20–June 5): 9 Project members (active June 5–end of March, 2012): 12
… -
- Past
MADE-IN-JAPAN Table Clocks: Focusing on the 1960’s
2011.2.5(Sat.) - 2011.5.29(Sun.)
During Japan’s post-war economic recovery in the 1950s and 1960s, a style of design alien to traditional lifestyle sensibilities permeated the Japanese way of life under America’s influence. Among the items of that time, made-in-Japan clocks of brilliant plastic colors still strike a fresh impression. In this exhibition, we present some 400 table clocks of the Showa period.
… -
- Past
Untitled: Tadaaki Kuwayama
2011.1.8(Sat.) - 2011.3.21(Mon.)
Fifty years after his first solo exhibition in 1961, contemporary artist Tadaaki Kuwayama continues to challenge established art concepts in his quest for “Pure Art.” Kuwayama moved to the United States in 1958, after studying Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. There, he established his own expressive style, employing the materials of Nihonga in paintings that went to extremes to expel meaning and emotion from the picture surface. In the 1970s, his work took on materiality as a result of his selection of neutral colors and inorganic materials. By the 1990s, this work had evolved into spatial constructions employing repetitive panels of artificial mood. This exhibition features new works giving maximum play to the distinctive architectural spaces of this museum, such as its galleries of varying sizes and proportions, and courtyards. Through Kuwayama’s Project for 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, we will have opportunity to experience his continually evolving art in its current form.
… -
- Past
Takashi Homma: New Documentary
2011.1.8(Sat.) - 2011.3.21(Mon.)
Photographs by Takashi Homma are known for reflecting dry sentiment of the times and giving us a feeling of distance toward the subject. Dealing with a variety of themes, such as architecture, ocean waves, children seen in Tokyo and suburban scenery, he has serialized many of them over the years. Keeping away from describing narrative or emotion, his neutral viewpoint captures the subject unemotionally, which is suitably called “new documentary” that leans towards neither expression nor record advancing from the age when the two were specifically questioned. While he has kept having “a documentative viewpoint” since the start of his career as a photographer, he has tackled possibilities of the photographic expression by “approaching photography as art.” Recently in particular, his creative activities pursuing more subjective expressions have broadened while openly dealing with the real world and the times. In this exhibition, not only his prints in the past but also his latest works using different methods and media, such as silk screens based on photos, installations to be viewed through binoculars, books full of images as well as paintings are introduced, raising a question of “what photography is.” They lead viewers to think about the meaning of “seeing” through the reality reflected on the photographs. For example, there is Trails in pursuit of the trail of deer hunting in a snow-covered mountain and a painting on the same subject. Tokyo and My Daughter, his lifework for which he continues taking a picture of Tokyo scenery and a girl, and Widows are works that he re-photographed so-called “found photos” discovered in family albums of the protagonists. Thus, he intervenes, going beyond the limits of time, in photographed people’s eyes turned upon their families and friends. Homma’s new work re-construction is a collection of works made into a book form, in which he re-photographed magazine covers and pages he edited. Others include exhibition leaflets, posters and their proof sheets, which reveal how lightly he has been working all over media of different kinds. You may say that to re-photograph by his own hands what he photographed is a reviewing act in itself of photography as a medium. For the display of this exhibition, Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA designed a booth in the area connecting exhibition rooms. With its light, graceful space arrangement, Homma’s works are all the more impressive.
… -
- Past
D&DEPARTMENT PROJECT
Only honest design can be recyclable.
2010.10.9(Sat.) - 2011.1.30(Sun.)
New designs are being generated continuously as the time change. Not only the products but also the designs of the products are being consumed in the lifecycle model of modern consumption which is heavily dependent on trends. D&DEPARTMENT PROJECT focuses on the fact that there are used “long-life designed” products which remain in society and is offering/practicing the recycling model, that is a way to recycle products at the scene of consumption. This recycle model includes the following steps. 1.Selecting the long life designed/second hand products and selling them, 2.repurchasing products from buyers and 3.resselling them to new consumers. Our aim is to present the idea that we can create a new market and avoid the disappearance of designs if there is a system where products can be sold a number of times and used over many years. In this exhibition, D&DEPARTMENT PROJECT’s course of actions (choosing and purchasing “long life designs” that should be conserved over the years out of the products relinquished by the consumers) is divided into three parts and presented in three terms (exhibitions). Kenmei Nagaoka’s statement can be seen from here. Only honest design can be recyclable.
… -
- Past
Peter Fischli David Weiss
2010.9.18(Sat.) - 2010.12.25(Sat.)
Traveling through an endless tunnel of changing light and color. A rat and bear go out on the town and through art and philosophy offer insights into the absurdities of the human condition. Everyday items teeter, precariously balanced. Energy passes by a whisker from one piece of junk to another, in a series of seemingly impromptu chain reactions. Airport scenes from across the globe float alongside a panoramic selection of this world's doings, big and small, rendered in ninety or so pieces of clay. Questions about life and the world that might occur to anyone appear and disappear, drifting ceaselessly through the air. In tiny black and white photos fairytale-like scenes have soft black contours. The tranquil, mundane everyday is suffused with wonder and chaos, tragedy and comedy, melancholy and nothingness. Wielding a formidable armory of media from photography to sculpture to video and more with extraordinary flexibility, Peter Fischli and David Weiss focus intensely on familiar scenes and things, presenting divergent meanings and diversity of interpretation via a combination of meticulous planning and coincidence, throwing into relief the essence of the human condition in works shot through with irony and humor. We hope viewers will enjoy the strange wonder of Fischli/Weiss art, and their encyclopedic worlds suffused with an original, unconventional aesthetic. Image:The Least Resistance 1980-81 film still camera: Jürg V. Walther
… -
- Past
Collection Exhibition: Invisible Reality
2010.9.11(Sat.) - 2011.4.10(Sun.)
An exhibition featuring pieces from the museum collection, which consists primarily of works produced since the 1980s. The Collection Exhibition presents important artworks reflecting the changing values and transitions of contemporary society and, by weaving complex perspectives into their presentation, explores social issues.
… -
- Past
Tadasu Takamine Good House, Nice Body
2010.4.29(Thu.) - 2011.3.21(Mon.)
Contemporary artist TAKAMINE Tadasu has continually cast light on social issues employing his own experiences and body. “TAKAMINE Tadasu: Good House, Nice Body,” is a long-term project composed of two parts, “Good House” and “Nice Body.” For approximately one year, through their own physical involvement, numerous project participants will re-examine the attitudes we hold toward our “house” and “body”—attitudes that grow obtuse in day-to-day life despite the vital importance our house and body have for us as abodes for our existence.
… -
- Past
HACHIYA Kazuhiko “OpenSky” Project
2010.4.29(Thu.) - 2010.8.31(Tue.)
HACHIYA Kazuhiko’s “OpenSky” began as a “personal attempt to build a flying machine” and has become a project aimed at realizing a one-man jet glider that can actually fly. An overall look at “OpenSky,” now in its final stage in 2010, through design drawings, test flight videos, and simulators.
… -
- Past
Alternative Humanities: Jan Fabre × Katsura Funakoshi
2010.4.29(Thu.) - 2010.8.31(Tue.)
A large-scale exhibition devoted to Jan FABRE and Katsura FUNAKOSHI —two of today’s most influential artists. The exhibition will individually explore the spiritual sources of each artist in religious icons appearing in masterworks of history and thereby consider the character of 21st-century man. Born in Belgium, Fabre remains attuned to the religious paintings of 15th and 16th century Flanders, while exposing the contradictions of human existence through pictures drawn with his own blood and sculptures employing stuffed animals, animal bones, and other organic materials. The figurative sculptures that Funakoshi carves from camphor wood speak eloquently of the interior landscape of people in our times. They also resonate with the complex emotions visible in images of the Kannon bodhisattva of the late Edo/early Meiji period—a major turning point in Japanese culture. Marie-Laure BERNADAC, a curator of contemporary art at the Louvre, will co-produce the exhibition. Project advisors TAKASHINA Shuji and FURUTA Ryo will comprehensively examine the art of Fabre and Funakoshi in connection with the historical past. Gathering some 190 works in a meeting of East and West, past and present, the exhibition will transcend time and place to inquire into state of the human spirit today.
… -
- Past
minä perhonen The future from the past
2010.1.16(Sat.) - 2010.5.30(Sun.)
The fashion brand “minä perhonen” has a rich appeal that never fades with time. Having begun by creating original fabrics, minä perhonen has since amassed an archive that is becoming an inspirational source for the fashions of the future. This exhibition will display two dresses illustrating the connectivity of past and future.
… -
- Past
Olafur Eliasson "Your chance encounter"
2009.11.21(Sat.) - 2010.3.22(Mon.)
In marking its fifth anniversary, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa will hold a large-scale solo exhibition structured around new works by the Danish/ Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson titled Your chance encounter.” Olafur Eliasson is known for his exploration of the human perception. His works, often using light, shadow, color, fog, wind, waves, and other phenomena of nature as materials, make apparent to the viewer the mechanisms employed in their presentation. Contrary to what might be expected, this enables people to enjoy more purely the act of seeing, as they discover and experience their surroundings. For example, in Your atmospheric colour atlas, 2009, a large gallery is filled with artificially produced fog, imbued with color emanating from fluorescent tubes of red, green and blue. By moving about in the locations where the colors blend, viewers endlessly create their own color spectrum. Based on a profound understanding of SANAA’s design for this museum, both architecturally and functionally, Eliasson boldly engages the factors that constitute 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. In Eye activity line, 2009, 317 canvases of different colors, each about the size of an A5 sheet of paper, are installed on the wall of a long corridor. As our eye follows along the work, which is like a full palette of colors, we are freshly awakened to the character of the space. In such ways, Eliasson explores the Museum’s unique features, displaying works not only in galleries but also in corridors and rest areas, so as to give play to the Museum’s meandering layout and horizontal character, and endeavoring through his artworks to bring interior and exterior into close connection. As they move through the museum building, visitors may be surprised at how Eliasson has transformed the familiar art museum spaces. Eliasson is interested in how 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa—an art museum designed with the functions of a new generation of museums—fulfills a social role as a museum opened to the city. Through this exhibition, he is re-proposing the art museum, not simply as a facility for viewing art in a context removed from society but as a public space having the potential to deeply engage in the society and the urban environment.
… -
- Past
Collection Exhibition "Shift - Field of Fluctuation"
2009.9.12(Sat.) - 2010.4.11(Sun.)
At some odd moment, something happens and suddenly a routinely familiar scene appears like a different world, filled with new meaning. To some extent, we have all experienced this kind of unexpected shift in our perspective or feelings. In contemporary society, overwhelmed by a perpetual flood of things and information, we grow numb in mind and body, and our thinking simply traces the contours of established concepts. What if we should stop, free our thoughts and perceptions, and look freshly at the world now before us and at the events of the past? What if we gave ourselves to the fluctuation and change in our own physical sensations, and to new perceptions and feelings? The works presented in this exhibition work on our sensibilities and promote such a shift in perspective, perceptions, and values. Taking “Shift—Field of Fluctuation” as its keyword, this Collection Exhibition will give play to the unique features of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, which is currently marking its fifth anniversary. In glass-enclosed spaces permitting a soft permeability between interior and exterior—where the everyday and the unusual blend in unexpected ways—the exhibition will blur the outlines of things, including our own.
… -
- Past
Tadanori Yokoo Incomplete - What's yours is mine. What's mine is mine.
2009.8.1(Sat.) - 2009.11.3(Tue.)
The essence of Tadanori Yokoo’s art, which cuts across the genres of painting, design, film, theater, music, and culture, is “incompleteness.” In a process of altering our conceptions of the world, Yokoo feeds into himself all he sees and hears, reinterprets it, and outputs it in his own distinctive way. This exhibition, which turns Yokoo’s “incomplete” world inside out and explores it front to back, can be considered Tadanori Yokoo’s Unfinished Symphonic poem. ■ Mass release of uncompleted paintings stored away in Yokoo’s studio Unexhibited works, uncompleted works, rejected works [Gallery 11] ■ Mass outbreak of uncompleted paintings outside Yokoo’s studio ・ Works born from PCPPP and “Yokoo’s Studio” [Galleries 7, 8; Project Room] ■ Incomplete person = incomplete icons the youth in Yokoo endlessly recreates ・ “Pink Girl”: The Madonna of a never-aging youth’s dreams [Galleries 9, 10] ・ “Rousseau”: Yokoo’s bold and impudent acts of parody [Gallery 14] ・ “Y Junction”: Where Yokoo lives—the junction of roads of unknown destination [Galleries 7, 8; other]
… -
- Past
Knit Cafe in my Room by Mitsuharu Hirose and Minako Nishiyama
2009.4.29(Wed.) - 2010.3.22(Mon.)
A tireless proponent of the knitting world, Mitsuharu HIROSE produces highly original knit pieces that display his superb technique. Minako NISHIYAMA pursues an “admirable” or “ideal” world for both the individual and the community through her own free-form language. Here in collaboration, they produce in the exhibition space “Knit Cafe in my Room”, a platform for various knitting projects aimed at aficionados. Through this long-term project, the significance and possibilities of knitting and creativity are explored.
… -
- Past
Hundred Stories about Love
2009.4.29(Wed.) - 2009.8.30(Sun.)
The year 2009 has arrived amid the turmoil of tragic war and a search for new values at the start of a new century. The world around us is changing at an ever-increasing speed. Meanwhile, injured in body and mind, hungry, thirsty, and wandering, we fulfill the tasks of living, as people have done since ancient times. In our experience as human beings, there is perhaps nothing more mysterious than love. “The opposite of love is not hate but indifference and apathy,” philosopher Tetsuzo Tanigawa has said. During our brief lives, we have always found in love something to believe in. Then, there has perhaps never been a time like ours so badly in need of love. This year, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa will mark its fifth year. In order to create a forum for dialogue concerning love in its open system of galleries whose round glass walls promote transparency, horizontality, and multi-directionality, the Museum is transcending existing boundaries to invite the participation of researchers and activists in the realms of culture, society, and natural science, and that of creators in wide-ranging genres such as art, music, literature, and the performing arts. The varied forms of expression appearing in the exhibition, “Hundred Stories about Love,” are waiting for someone at anytime to experience them, tell of them, and transform them. A story is no less than an “open dialogue” occurring at the scene of an encounter. The dialogue generated ceaselessly at the Museum will no doubt produce stories in rich profusion. (Translated from Japanese: Brian Amstutz)
… -
- Past
Hiroshi Sugimoto:History of History
2008.11.22(Sat.) - 2009.3.22(Sun.)
Art is technique: a means by which to materialize the invisible realm of the mind. As such, my art is an emblematic rendering of part of my mind in visible form̶or perhaps we might say,samplings from my consciousness. Over my many years as an artist, I have endeavored to hone my technique. The origins of art thus share a common timeframe with the origins of humankind, its beginnings coinciding with the advent of human consciousness. In the course of honing my own technique, Iʼve had to take many predecessors as my models so as to acquire what is to be learned from them̶or again perhaps we might say my models have been sampled from the horizons reached by those predecessors. Whenever I obtained one sample and gained an understanding of a technique, each new mindset made me want the next sample and the next. Understanding one thing always brought the realization that more profound unknowns lay beyond. And so my sample gathering caused a chain reaction that led on who-knows-where. The samples collected here represent offshoot selves, or no, former selves assembled out of necessity in order to learn something or absorb some nurturing sustenance toward further transforming my own art. From these samples, I may now infer how the past relates to my works via an imaginary journey to verify the site of innumerable actualities. I pick up a paleolithic stone tool and it fits snugly in the palm of my hand. I experience the revolutionary technical leap of paleolithic man and the epiphany enters my consciousness̶then I reach for an even better neolithic stone tool. In one instant, I have taken in hundreds of thousands of years of human development. I look at hieroglyphic writing in the Egyptian Book of the Dead and see images of gods. This piece of linen thought to have once wrapped a dead body hands me a five-millennia yardstick. The slow passage of ages past seems to speed up and rush headlong at my present self. Changes that once took a thousands years are now achieved in a matter of decades. Timeʼs arrow keeps accelerating asymptotically toward some critical juncture. Civilizations have come and gone since the dawn of heaven and earth, writing and rewriting history at every turn. History is simply the victorsʼ story as passed down by the survivors. And yet the losersʼ stories that have become mere relics for lack of anyone to relate them, those closed pages still tell me things. Just as lifeforms extinct for millions of years still speak to me via their fossils. Throughout my life Iʼve taken one step back from history and gazed fondly at my collection of relics. These relics Iʼve assembled present a history of what history has forgotten, of where stories ended between closed covers. SUGIMOTO Hiroshi
… -
- Past
- To Create Our Own Place by Ourselves –
Kanazawa Art Platform 2008
2008.10.4(Sat.) - 2008.12.7(Sun.)
“KANAZAWA ART PLATFORM 2008” is a project-type exhibition that 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa holds in the city of Kanazawa. In recent years, many artists have played an active part, directly involved in the community. How can they make an impact on society through their activities? How can they propose new ideas for the future? With these tough issues, they are exploring the possibilities of art, considering the real society a place for their practice and expression. Artists who deal with their works in such a constructive manner have specif ic characteristics in common. Instead of going ahead as a person of expression, they would rather put themselves in a coordinator’s position laboring to construct the basic framework and overall circumstances. What they regard as important is a mutual relationship; understanding, consent, and opposition sometimes. Being free from fixed ideas such as exhibition form, and genres of art, architecture or design, they approach projects cross wise in terms of the possibility of expression. In addition, they put a greater emphasis on chemistry between their works and the place where local people live and its continuity rather than extra ordinariness of artworks. There, coordination and site-specific work take precedence, and the involvement with many people is called for. Thus, “KANAZAWA ART PLATFORM 2008” is a project which provides a place where the residents of Kanazawa and artists, who are subjectively involved in activities in the community, can continue coordinating with each other. “Platform” literally represents a station platform where people meet with one another through art and it will lead to new happenings, so that new by passes are made around different frameworks of companies, homes, schools and communities. Finally, it will provide a good opportunity for people to meet and converse with each other livening up the city. In “KANAZAWA ART PLATFORM,” we try to establish a place where people begin dialogues, not monologues, to promote a better relationship with the society. “KANAZAWA ART PLATFORM” is a project-type exhibition to be held triennial. Now we celebrate its first year, and this time, the theme is “to create our own place by ourselves.” Into this theme, we, citizens living in Kanazawa, have put our wish to make up a “platform” where we can get involved in the activities in the community together with artists. The goal of “KANAZAWA ART PLATFORM 2008” is that each citizen can enrich his or her life with confidence in the familiar surroundings through working together with artists. AKIMOTO Yuji Director, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa *exclusive site http://www.kanazawa21.jp/exhibit/k_plat/english.php
… -
- Past
「shell - shelter」
Collection II
2008.9.13(Sat.) - 2009.4.12(Sun.)
Collection II 「shell - shelter」 There will be no safety zone. --- from: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, ANN LEE IN ANZEN ZONE The “Collection Exhibition” presents important art works reflecting the changing values and transitions of contemporary society and, through their presentation, explores current social issues. The keywords for “Collection II” are “shell — shelter.” The images of the human body presented in the exhibition suggest varying perspectives—a standard for value judgment, a cast-off shell of the emotions or spirit, a shelter allowing us to continue being who we are, life and death, and so on. While questioning existing values and rendering apparent our loneliness and uncertainty, our helplessness, and the distance between us as individuals, these works endeavor to discover anew a place of survival and meaningful existence. *exclusive site http://www.kanazawa21.jp/exhibit/collection/2008_2/index_en.html
… -
- Past
MAKOTO SAITO: SCENE [0]
2008.8.2(Sat.) - 2008.11.3(Mon.)
The first large-scale solo exhibition in Japan devoted to Makoto Saito, a creator internationally renowned in the graphic design field. Through innovative expression in the 1980s and '90s, Saito shattered the norms of graphic design, and has since reshaped the design field. Now, in a much-anticipated exhibition of new works he will launch into the twenty-first century, Saito presents some 50 of the paintings he has been incubating for years. Saito's wide-ranging creative activities have heretofore emerged from a perpetual themeーhis investigation into the act of "seeing." In the mid- '90s, Saito began to explore the painting genre in earnest, alongside his activities in the design field. His paintings, this time, reflect as ever the penetrating eye he continually casts on contemporary life. Among their subjects are movies, a medium of special meaning to him that he has felt close to since childhood. Capturing a single, instantaneous shot from a movie, he boldly deconstructs it employing the contemporary filter of digital technology. The exhibition will provide a glimpse into Saito's present creative world and his endeavor to expand the act of "seeing" to an act of "depicting." The human figures we encounter in these paintings are veiled in a frosty cold atmosphere from which we sense no warmth. From a temperatureless zero pointーSCENE [0]ーa disquieting world slowly emerges. It is as if the artist were consciously defying today's trend of conveniently seeking healing in warmth and naturalness. Saito's pictorial space, constructed using his own unique motifs and textures, captures the feel of our times and portrays us, the people of contemporary society, with merciless objectivity. *exclusive site http://www.kanazawa21.jp/exhibit/saitou/index_en.html
… -
- Past
Katsuhiko HIBINO Art Project
‘HOME→AND←AWAY’ SYSTEM meets NODA [But-a-I]
2008.5.31(Sat.) - 2008.10.19(Sun.)
The second phase of “HOME→AND←AWAY” SYSTEM, launched in 2007, is entitled “Katsuhiko HIBINO Art Project ‘HOME→AND←AWAY’ SYSTEM meets NODA [But-a-I].” In this phase, Katsuhiko Hibino and Hideki Noda will travel back and forth between each other’s “HOME→AND←AWAY” (art and theater) in a grand experiment in expressive action. By introducing the element of theater into art through workshops and stage design, Katsuhiko Hibino will seek to expand the possibilities for expression in the art museum context. Through interaction with the “art museum gallery”—what is for him an “away” setting—Hideki Noda will reach for new expressive potential. Constructed from over 2,000 Owase hinoki (Japanese cypress) trees, the [But-a-I] stage displayed in the gallery functions as a device for converting visitors alternately to actors and viewers. The [But-a-I] workshop launched in April in the Project Room, moreover, will expand its activities to the [But-a-I] stage in the gallery and become a public workshop of open character. *exclusive site http://www.kanazawa21.jp/exhibit/hibino2008/
… -
- Past
Collection I
2008.5.27(Tue.) - 2008.7.21(Mon.)
Drawing from the Museum’s Collection, the “Collection Exhibition” presents a complex blend of viewpoints through the display of important artworks reflecting and influencing changes and transitions in human values. Employing such artworks, the exhibitions of this series explore diverse facets of contemporary society. “Collection I” introduces diverse styles of artistic expression through 40 works by 8 artists. The works of artist Canan DAGDELEN are characterized by her investigation of our cultural identity and our connectivity with our exterior physical environment. The four Dagdelen works displayed in this exhibition explore the instable character of our notions of “homeland” and “home.” Artist Ernesto NETO has won global acclaim with works investigating the relationship between body and space. His BODY SPACE NAVE MIND employs a highly elastic fabric, Lycra, in producing an installation reminding us of an immense, organic life form. With its fabric of skin-like feel and herbal fragrances, the work speaks directly to our body and mind about our connection with the myriad things existing around us. Sea Breeze, a piece representative of MURAKAMI Takashi’s early work, is also a must-see. In this work, shutters are attached to the front and back of an immense box-like form having wheels and tail lamps at its base. The shutters open at regular intervals to disclose powerful lights so bright, viewers must avert their eyes. Also displayed are works by Gabriel OROZCO, Johan GRIMONPREZ, HIBINO Katsuhiko, Carsten NICOLAI, and KAWASAKI Kazuo. Viewers are invited to enjoy artworks that explore the world around us and capture the character of human values, perceptions, and cognition of reality from many viewpoints. (This exhibition has ended.)
… -
- Past
Ron Mueck
2008.4.26(Sat.) - 2008.8.31(Sun.)
This is a solo exhibition of Ron Mueck (1958 - ), whose works attract a great deal of attention, to be held for the first time in Japan. Mueck who has a career of making models for movies and TV programs makes full use of materials such as silicon and fiberglass to express a human body in precise sculpture by means of a classic casting technique. To complete his work, Mueck devotes himself completely to communicate with materials and the motif in the long thorough process of production. In the world of his work, realism showing in detail even hair and blood vessels under the skin is interwoven with the unreality of sizes that are gigantic or minimum. You might say that the world of his works is criticizing the nature of human existence in the contemporary society. The world of MueckÅfs works, which cross the body and the spirit, and the ordinary and the unordinary, confronts us vividly with the essential issue in art, that is, the relation between "creation" and "the nature of human existence." *exclusive site http://www.kanazawa21.jp/exhibit/mueck/index_en.html
… -
- Past
Selected Chinese and Korean Ceramics from the Ataka Collection
THE EYES OF ATAKA EIICHI, SEEKERS OF TRUE ART
2008.2.9(Sat.) - 2008.3.20(Thu.)
The Ataka Collection is a compilation of approximately 1,000 pieces of Oriental ceramics collected as a business undertaking by Ataka Co., Ltd., a company once numbered among Japan’s ten largest trading firms. It was ATAKA Eiichi (1901-94) who oversaw the collecting with a keen, uncompromising eye and built a peerless ceramics collection. Eiichi served as company board chairman and later as counselor, but he is remembered primarily as an art collector and also as a patron of Western classical music in pre- and post-war Japan. ATAKA Eiichi was born to a family of wealth and power in Kanaiwa-cho, Ishikawa-gun, Ishikawa Prefecture (present-day Kanaiwa-cho, Kanazawa City). His grandfather, Kokichi, who had built a fortune through his dealings in finance, fertilizer and clothing, was among Kaga province’s wealthiest merchants. Eiichi’s father, Yakichi, devoted his energies to the importation of general goods, thereby laying a foundation for Ataka Co., Ltd. to become a distinguished trading company. Yakichi is also known as the foremost patron of scholar SUZUKI Daisetsu and philosopher NISHIDA Kitaro. After the dissolution of Ataka Co., Ltd., the Ataka Collection was ultimately donated to Osaka City by the twenty-one companies of the Sumitomo Group under the leadership of Sumitomo Bank, which had been Ataka Company’s main bank. Osaka City then founded The Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka in 1982 in order to house the Collection. Consisting mainly of Korean ceramics of the Goryeo and Joseon Dynasties and Chinese ceramics of the Tang, Song, Yuan, and Ming Dynasties, the Collection is widely esteemed as one of the finest ceramic collections in the world. This exhibition will present 56 gem-like works, including 2 national treasures and 11 important cultural properties, selected from the Collection under the supervision of The Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka. Visitors to this homecoming exhibition of a world-class collection closely associated with Kanazawa are invited to savor the beauty and enjoyment of Oriental ceramics. (This exhibition has ended.)
… -
- Past
Graphism in Wilderness : KIYOSHI AWAZU
2007.11.23(Fri.) - 2008.3.20(Thu.)
"Graphism in the Wilderness: Kiyoshi Awazu" presents the full scope of Kiyoshi Awazu's oeuvre and considers its meaning for us today through the display of over 1,750 principal works -including drawings, works never exhibited, and experimental films -from among the 2,600 Awazu works in the collection of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. In his dedication to experimental expression, Kiyoshi Awazu has traversed wide-ranging genres, saying, "In all expressive fields, I resolve to remove not only the boundaries among forms of expression; I will also remove class, category, disparity, and the upward and downward that have appeared in art." A singular genius with a ceaseless interest in the world around him, Awazu took up art amid his country's reconstruction from the ruins of war and went on to build a foundation for graphic design in Japan. He has since blazed a career cutting freely across the genres of painting, posters, prints, book design, architecture, music, film, performance, and theater. Having lost his father in a railroad accident soon after he was born, Awazu could look only to a newspaper article about the accident and three portrait photographs for clues to his father's existence. "The city raised me, " he says of a youth surrounded by ex-soldiers, joiners, and factory workers in his neighborhood. After the war, while bouncing from job to job, he began to sketch and paint on his own, using movies and art magazines as textbooks. An enormous volume of sketches -studies of passengers on Yamanote Line trains and people seen along roadsides- remain from that time. After winning the Grand Prize at the 1955 Nissenbi (Japan Advertising Artists' Club) Exhibition for his poster, "Umi wo Kaese" (Give Our Sea Back), Awazu entered the field of design, where he had experience with image reproduction and mass production using printing technology. "It was all a wilderness. The word 'graphic' didn't even exist," he recollects of that time. Perceiving as "graphism" the permeation of everyday life by automatically self-reproducing visual messages driven by modern reproduction technology, he searched intuitively for creative methods that were, by comparison, vulgar and pre-modern and formulated his own style. While pioneering a world of uniquely personal line drawing, Awazu embarked on a pilgrimage-like journey among idiosyncratic popular icons -fingerprints, palm lines, maps, and ink seals in the 1960s, and turtles, birds, camellias, Mona Lisas, and Abe Sadas in the 1970s. Recalling a childhood interest in reincarnation upon hearing the cellist Pablo Casals perform "Song of the Birds," Awazu furthermore began to depict birds. Since the 1980s, he has developed a strong interest in the global environment and state of human civilization. Amid his journey of revisiting the starting point of his thinking, he has expanded his range of vision to encompass prehistoric cave drawings and pictographs found in ethnic art -subjects transcending time and place. A pilgrim thus among icons having origins in extremely fundamental existence, Kiyoshi Awazu continues, even now, to stand alone in the wilderness. *exclusive site http://www.kanazawa21.jp/exhibit/awazu/index_en.html
… -
- Past
Collection II
2007.9.15(Sat.) - 2008.4.13(Sun.)
Artworks from the Museum collection are introduced. Particularly, works that respond to the change or conversion in the social value system elaboratingvarious perspectives are exhibited. This examines intricate relationshipsbetween human expressions and the society.
… -
- Past
Passion Complex: Selected Works from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery
2007.8.1(Wed.) - 2007.11.11(Sun.)
The Albright-Knox Art Gallery has developed its marvelous collection, focusing on artists whose works reflect their contemporaneity of their time, the "here and now". The exhibition "Passion Complex: Selected Works from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery" introduces 15 artists who have radical points of view, whose works mirror the intricacies of human inner worlds and the incredible ranges of passion in our contemporary life. These artists gain insights into mundane landscape of our daily life and complexities of human relationships. For some, their expressions take as motifs the familiar in our ordinary, such as a plastic bag and a fluorescent light, and, by simple transformation of size or color, generate something unknown, or extraordinary. Concealed with their apparent familiarity and surface beauty, the works that reflect the absurdity, ennui, or anxiety of everyday life using inescapable memory drag us to the realm of passion that has been buried deeply inside today's world. *exclusive site http://www.kanazawa21.jp/exhibit/p_complex/index_en.html
… -
- Past
My Civilisation: Grayson Perry
2007.4.28(Sat.) - 2007.8.31(Fri.)
In this first solo exhibition of the work of Grayson Perry ever mounted in Japan, an attempt has been made to introduced the full scope of the artist’s oeuvre, from early works to his most recent. Perry, the Turner Prize winner of 2003, is one of the most acclaimed contemporary artists in the U.K., known primarily for his provocative ceramic works. Grayson Perry was born in Chelmsford (U.K.) in 1960, and currently lives in London. In addition to creating his highly elaborated ceramic works, Perry works in a wide range of media such as embroidery, photography, printmaking and sculpture. A consistent element in all his work, however, is the way he deals unflinchingly with such serious subjects as violence, prejudices, sexual suppression and the conventional customs and beliefs that people rely on, without fear of being misunderstood. His artistic expression is often flavored with fantasy and humor, as well as self-identification. Many of his works contain autobiographical elements. Perry often dresses as a transvestite and his female image, Claire, appears as an important character in many of his creations. Another important character that often appears in Perry’s works is Alan Measles, a teddy bear that can be a “surrogate father” figure and the artist’s protector. With about 70 works, including dozens of new creations, this exhibition invites us to set out on a voyage through a unique world that Perry calls his ‘civilization’. *exclusive site http://www.kanazawa21.jp/exhibit/perry/index_e.html
… -
- Past
Collection I
2007.4.28(Sat.) - 2007.7.16(Mon.)
Artworks from the Museum collection are introduced. Particularly, works that respond to the change or conversion in the social value system elaboratingvarious perspectives are exhibited. This examines intricate relationshipsbetween human expressions and the society.
… -
- Past
Katsuhiko HIBINO Art Project " HOME AND AWAY" SYSTEM
2007.4.1(Sun.) - 2008.3.20(Thu.)
Katsuhiko HIBINO Art Project " HOME AND AWAY" SYSTEM is almost a-year on-going project. Its educational part is modeld on "Zon Moderna" in Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden. A part of this Art Project, "Asatte Asagao Project 21" starts from April and continues until November 2007. The exhibition of Katsuhiko HIBINO is on view from September 29, 2007. *exclusive site http://www.kanazawa21.jp/exhibit/hibino/photo_e.html
… -
- Past
Atelier Bow-Wow “IKI-IKI Machiya Project”
2007.4.1(Sun.) - 2007.9.17(Mon.)
Atelier Bow-Wow, an architectural team formed of TSUKAMOTO Yoshiharu and KAIJIMA Momoyo, investigates the city of Kanazawa and constructs a proposal for a vibrant architectural space. Atelier Bow-Wow is noted for creating unique designs based on regional investigations, such as “Moving Furniture” and “Movable Classroom.” In this project, they explore the possibilities of collaborations between architects and regional volunteers.
… -
- Past
Real Utopia - Stories of the Unlimited
2006.11.23(Thu.) - 2007.3.21(Wed.)
"Real Utopia - Stories of the Unlimited" is an exhibition which perceive patterns of human's perception of the world and the world itself as mixture of axis of multiple times and spaces, and it explores such images through artworks by Lee Bul, Yayoi Kusama, Sayako Kishimoto, and Taiyo Kimura. Lee's cyborg or monster images revolve around human's relation to the nature and the boarder of the reality and human's creations over times. Live and death, self and the world, Kusama explores such relations through endless creation of artworks. Kishimoto, through her performance and painting, pursued the significance of the individual existence and art expression in society by her own theory of social criticism. Artworks of Kimura's, which delineate unique humors and sarcasm, show particular ways of perception of the reality. These artworks show diversity of human's perception of the reality and its complicate relations to the collective and society, and indicate landscapes of human's quest for the existence in their own roots, their utopian places, living at the present moment. These pursuit, in other words, are to consider how they place themselves at the present, traveling around various time-space.
… -
- Past
Yoshitomo Nara: Moonlight Serenade
2006.9.30(Sat.) - 2007.3.21(Wed.)
Yoshitomo Nara: Moonlight Serenade overviews the whole process of Nara's creativity and perception of the world. It introduces the new projects such as; the new installation Voyage of the Moon in close collaboration with a creative unit graf; the extra large staffed animal production project “Pup Up the Dog”; and “Pup Patrol” that schoolchildren in dog costumes designed by Nara make explorations of the museum. Furthermore, in “Studio Cafe yngm:k”, graf creates “hut”-like wooden space, where they run a cafe. The next to the cafe becomes the studio for Nara's residency-production. Through theses devices as platforms, this exhibition creates the poetic space-time, bringing variety of artistic activities such as music and performances along with exhibiting new sculpture and paintings. *exclusive site http://www.kanazawa21.jp/nara/index_e.html
… -
- Past
artificial heart: Kazuo Kawasaki
2006.9.16(Sat.) - 2006.11.12(Sun.)
From scrub brushes, eyeglasses, interior design, wheelchairs, computers, and robots to a household nuclear power generation device and an artificial heart—the works of KAWASAKI Kazuo run the gamut. This is a large-scale solo exhibition devoted to Kawasaki, a designer who is ever pursuing new horizons. The exhibition’s keywords—“life, feeling, form.” Active at the cutting edge of technology, Kawasaki claims that “in the 21st century, design will change Japan and save the world.” He also insists on the value of “designing by hand.” His creations will be presented in hands-on displays utilizing video and music. Above all, do not miss PLATON’S ORGEL, an installation of twelve objects featuring fragments of Beatles tunes.
… -
- Past
Collection II
2006.9.1(Fri.) - 2007.4.12(Thu.)
Artworks from the Museum collection are introduced. Particularly, works that respond to the change or conversion in the social value system elaboratingvarious perspectives are exhibited. This examines intricate relationshipsbetween human expressions and the society. *exclusive site http://www.kanazawa21.jp/collection06_2/en/index.html
… -
- Past
From the Collection of S.M.A.K., Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent
We Humans are Free:
2006.4.29(Sat.) - 2006.8.31(Thu.)
To celebrate the 35th anniversary of the sister-city relationship between the cities of Kanazawa and Ghent, we introduce about 70 works by 11 artists selected from the collection of S.M.A.K., Museum of Contemporary Art, Ghent. Up to the present day from the beginning of the 20th century, the theme “art & life” has always been important in art. It will be safe to say that since the foundation in 1975, S.M.A.K. has been one of the museums playing an active part in pursuing this theme most earnestly. Three artists, Beuys, Broodthaers, and Panamarenko, who the Museum itself calls “Big Triangle”, approved all human potentialities, criticized the “art” system with narrow views, and tried to broaden the concept of “art” to the extent of “life.” This attitude has been passed on through the artists’ activities and works which characterize today’s S.M.A.K.-Barrio, Weinberger, and others. Sharing the attitude of S.M.A.K., we at this museum in Kanazawa are pleased to introduce their activities in this exhibition. *Press Releases http://www.kanazawa21.jp/data_list.php?g=62&lng=e
… -
- Past
Collection I
2006.3.21(Tue.) - 2006.8.20(Sun.)
Artworks from the Museum collection are introduced. Particularly, works that respond to the change or conversion in the social value system elaboratingvarious perspectives are exhibited. This examines intricate relationshipsbetween human expressions and the society.
… -
- Past
Alternative Paradise
2005.11.5(Sat.) - 2006.3.5(Sun.)
Alternative Paradise is a thematic exhibition featuring new expressions, in an attempt to redefine a value notion of “Kogei” – a genre that has been considered somewhat peripheral from the perspective of the 20th century western modernism – by looking at their artistic attributes. The exhibition is comprised of two sections; an artistic space by eleven Japanese and international artists, all known for their specific mode of expression and the materials they use, and T-ROOM, a collaborative effort of KUMA Kengo (direction), IWAI Toshio, HARA Kenya, and FUKASAWA Naoto, where a tea-ceremony room is reinterpreted in a contemporary sense. All expressions here take a certain stance that capitalizes on “nature” as well as “other,” which was in a variety of ways believed to discover in another type of utopia – alternative paradise – different from the one that western modernism, dominant in the 20th century looked to. The idea is developed so as to use the gallery spaces almost to the full extent. *exclusive site http://www.kanazawa21.jp/alternative_paradise/e/index.html
… -
- Past
Gerhard Richter: Painting as Mirror
2005.9.3(Sat.) - 2005.10.26(Wed.)
Gerhard Richter is one of the most important artists of our time. This solo-exhibition will show Richter’s works from the past forty years of his artistic career, since the 1960s. This is the first time in Japan to have an exhibition showing more than fifty major works of Richter, including the ones loaned by the artist himself. Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden, in former East Germany, in 1932. He moved to Düsseldorf, in former West Germany, right before the Berlin Wall was erected to separate his country. He now lives in Cologne. In 2002, he had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a solo exhibition in Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen at the beginning of 2005, which had as many as 110,000 visitors. Richter is considered to be one of the most important artists in the world. Richter has an astonishing variety of artistic styles: Photo-Painting, where he precisely reproduces photographic images from newspapers and magazines and gives the finishing touch of a delicate blur, the Colour Chart Series, geometric arrangements of square and rectangular colourful chips, the Grey Painting Series and Landscapes that remind us of German Romantic paintings, Abstract Paintings with vibrant colour combinations, and works that use transparent and painted glass and mirrors. These works seem to be incompatible as far as common artistic goals. They, however, have in common Richter’s consistent philosophy to pursue potential in paintings. Through his original two-dimensional works that blur the borders between “photography and paintings,” “figurative and abstract,” “reality and virtual reality,” Richter continues his pursuit of “vision.” His works can be perceived as “mirrors” to reflect upon our world where reality and image are equally present in our contemporary life dominated by media such as the Internet. Most of the works in this exhibition will be shown in Japan for the first time, including six new oil paintings. This will give us a very good opportunity to explore different aspects of Richter’s art, which continues to evolve. *exclusive site http://www.kanazawa21.jp/richter/e/index.html
… -
- Past
MATTHEW BARNEY: DRAWING RESTRAINT
2005.7.2(Sat.) - 2005.8.25(Thu.)
The exhibition is constructed with DRAWING RESTRAINT 1 to 8, comprised of video, photographs, and sculpture; and the new DRAWING RESTRAINT 9, consisting of sculpture, photographs, video, and films. Using the differently proportioned gallery spaces of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Barney designed a bold exhibiting construction connecting between galleries. His other work, the Path, representing three elements of "condition" "situation" and "production", which is the origin of the DRAWING RESTRAINT series, will be also exhibited. *exclusive site http://www.kanazawa21.jp/barney/e/index.html
… -
- Past
Museums for a New Millennium: Concepts Projects Building
2005.4.29(Fri.) - 2005.5.22(Sun.)
Many of museums constructed in recent years are materialized in shape with a pure vision of the architect, and can perceive the reduced drawing of a present age architectural culture by taking a general view of them. The reflection of the flow of a cultural frame over the museum of today, a city planning idea, and the society can be clearly read there. This project be to apply the focus to the museum construction at the 20th end of the century, and to try to offer the view concerning the museum construction and the museum activity that do the bird's-eyeview, and the world is excellent, and to search by a new museum image of the 21st century as for the trend of today's architectural field.
… -
- Past
KAZUYO SEJIMA + RYUE NISHIZAWA / SANAA
2005.4.29(Fri.) - 2005.5.22(Sun.)
In this exhibition of SEJIMA Kazuyo and NISHIZAWA Ryue, the architects of 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, we will exhibit their realized architectures and unrealized ideas, so that we can show the concept of their architectures, including our museum. Also, we will show their attitude to the architectures and cities today, which we can see in their plans of architecture and cities. Through this, we can reconsider the situation of architecture and city today.
… -
- Past
OPENING EXHIBITION The Encounters in the 21st Century :
Polyphony -Emerging Resonances
2004.10.9(Sat.) - 2005.3.21(Mon.)
This exhibition, which will mark the opening of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, encompasses 40 artists from 17 countries, and includes 80 works from the Museum's collection. 20 of the 40 artists represented will be creating new works specifically designed for the Museum space. This exhibition represents works that are fragile and delicate, and also, those that are open and resonant with the world while emanating their very own "sound." The works spill out from one exhibition space to another and scatter, expanding out into the encompassing circular space; a current reminiscent of a neural network. Within this circuit, the spatial orientation such as front and back, above and below, and linear progression of time, and even, gravity are all lost. Instead, an unknown sensibility will be extracted. The design of this museum itself reprograms individual experiences into something unique.
…