Lost In Translation

What's The Story

My friend Lorenzo is holding an art exhibition at a cool bar in Nishi Azabu. Check it out if you have the time.

Takashi Murakami Japanese Andy Wharhol?

From an article in the NY Times:

Who knew that the first Louis Vuitton boutique in Brooklyn would touch down smack in the middle of an exhibition in one of the borough’s most venerable art institutions?

But there it is, at the Brooklyn Museum, bright and gleaming and blending seamlessly with its setting: a sleek, stylish and sometimes silly survey of the work of Takashi Murakami. Mr. Murakami, who is frequently called the Japanese Andy Warhol, is an astute manipulator of visual languages, artistic mediums and business models. The boutique will sell Vuitton bags, wallets and other accessories dotted with the signature Murakami jellyfish eyes, red cherries or pink cherry blossoms for the duration of the exhibition.

Say Cheese! A History Of The Snapshot

Slate has a really great slide-show essay on the history of the snapshot. Click here to check it out.

Watching Sex In The Park

WHY are the Japanese couples in Kohei Yoshiyuki’s photographs having sex outdoors? Was 1970s Tokyo so crowded, its apartments so small, that they were forced to seek privacy in public parks at night? And what about those peeping toms? Are the couples as oblivious as they seem to the gawkers trespassing on their nocturnal intimacy?

Click here to find out about it in a NY Times article.

Leonardo DaVinci Art Exhibition

My friend Ken's brother, Jun Shiozawa, has a cool cartoon review of the Leonardo Art Exhibiton in Tokyo at Tokyo Art Beat site.

Edward Hopper's Secret World

Slate has an interesting slide show of Edward Hopper paintings inspired by a retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I think Hopper's painting are pretty haunting and egnimatic. I think he captures the essence of urban city life in paintings like in the one above, Nighthawks.

Murakami: Japan's Warhol

Here's part of a review of Takashi Murakami's latest show from the NY Times:

Popularly known as the Warhol of Japan, Mr. Murakami, 45, merges fine art with popular Japanese anime films and manga cartoons. He has invented characters including DOB and Mr. Pointy, which he has used as the subjects of paintings, sculptures and giant balloons, and is also known for his smiley-faced flowers and colorful mushrooms. His work has adorned New York City landmarks like Grand Central Terminal and Rockefeller Center.

These days Mr. Murakami’s tentacles reach far and wide. In Japan he is busy producing feature-length animated films, and he is already considered a media king there, with a television and a radio show on which he interviews everyone from world-famous economists to novelists. A marketing impresario, he teamed up with the fashion house Louis Vuitton in 2003 to create brightly colored versions of the classic LV monogram on Vuitton handbags. They flew off the shelves, generating millions of dollars.

Now Mr. Murakami is looking back in history. His inaugural exhibition at Gagosian, “Tranquillity of the Heart, Torment of the Flesh: Open Wide the Eye of the Heart and Nothing Is Invisible,” is the first public showing of his new series of monumental paintings of Daruma, the sage, grand patriarch of Zen art and founder of Zen Buddhism. In certain Japanese Zen monasteries, Mr. Murakami said, the tea ceremony is still carried out in its original form to honor Daruma.

At Gagosian the ceremony began with a serving of neon-green spongecakes, in the center of which were two tiny egg yolks: something sweet for the palate, said Mr. Sen, 31, a descendant of the 16th-century tea master Sen no Rikyu. Then there was the elaborate preparation of the green tea, using a 400-year-old bamboo spoon to scoop the tea leaves out of an ancient wooden container. An antique iron kettle held the boiling water, while a modern bowl filled with boiling water was used to rinse out each of the 17th-century ceramic serving bowls that Mr. Murakami had brought from his home in Tokyo for the occasion.

“I wanted to bring something spiritually and culturally Japanese to a wider audience,” Mr. Murakami said as a Japanese television crew filmed his every move. “This is only the second time in my whole life I’ve dressed up like this,” he added. “The first time was when I was at the tea master’s house.”

Among the works in his exhibition are several three-panel paintings, nearly 8 feet wide and 9 feet tall, of a fierce-looking Daruma, each signed in the traditional Japanese manner, in Japanese characters down one side, and each with a different background, ranging from platinum and gold leaf to black glitter.

“The theme of Mr. Murakami’s exhibition is to take something very classical and render it very contemporary,” Ms. Hoaglund explained.

The paintings are not the only new direction Mr. Murakami has recently taken in his career; he has also changed dealers. In June he left Marianne Boesky’s Chelsea gallery after about a decade for Gagosian, the international powerhouse, because, “I am always looking for new ways of making art, and everyone knows Larry,” he said at the time, referring to Larry Gagosian. “When he asked me, it was good timing.”

The new work was a total surprise for Mr. Gagosian. “When I went to his studio, there was not a hint that these were the kind of paintings Takashi would produce,” he said. “His capacity to change the mood, direction and scale of his work is very exciting, and people went with it.” Even before the show opened on Tuesday, all the work had been sold, Mr. Gagosian said. Prices ranged from about $100,000 for the smaller paintings to $1.6 million for the large ones.

While the ever tight-lipped Mr. Gagosian would not say who the buyers were, experts in the field said seasoned collectors like François Pinault, the luxury-good magnate who owns Christie’s, and Steven A. Cohen, the hedge-fund manager, were among them.

The Daruma paintings are only part of the show, which runs through June 9. The floor below is filled with round canvases of smiling flowers, more in keeping with Mr. Murakami’s old self. On one wall hang 50 of them, each 15 ½ inches in diameter, with a group of larger variations filling the rest of the space.

“There’s always a shadow of Warhol,” Mr. Murakami said. And in the grand tradition of Warhol’s Factory, Mr. Murakami runs the Kaikai Kiki Company (named for two characters in his imaginary universe), which includes his own factorylike studios in Tokyo and Long Island City, Queens, where artists carry out his creations. In addition to Mr. Murakami’s signature, the names of all the contributing artists from his studio are also on the back of each flower paintings they worked on.

Japanese Picture Books

Slate has a great slideshow with different depictions of different periods of Japanese art from the last thousand years with commentary. The book above was created by Hokusai, one of the most famous Japanese artist of all-time. Click here to find the link.

The Lilliputian II

My friend Lorenzo is having another show called The Lilliputian II Exhibition. It will be held at the Cozmo Cafe bar located in Shibuya. The Opening party will be held on Friday 3rd November from 5pm. Between 6-8.30 Lorenzo will be doing live body painting.

O.N.E. Party at Velours

My friend Lorenzo did some performance art by body painting (body writing) at the O.N.E. event at the hip Aoyama club VELOURS last Saturday night. He spent several hours writing a story on the back of his model. The result is below. There were several other DJs and a good time was had by all.