Japanese Culture, in Vivid Color
“By the International Center of Photography’s own standards, ‘Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video From Japan,’ feels a bit phoned in,” writes Roberta Smith.
Slide Show Japanese Culture, in Vivid Color
It was probably too much to expect the International Center of Photography to have two excellent group shows of contemporary art in a row. Not many New York museums, especially small ones, manage that regularly. Thus “Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video From Japan,” coming after the dense, thought-provoking “From the Archive,” is just average, or a little less, by the center’s own standards.
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Organized by Christopher Phillips, a curator at the center, and Noriko Fuku, an independent curator from Japan, “Heavy Light” feels a bit phoned in. But with 13 artists, most of them in their 30s and 40s, it is the first large museum survey of Japanese photography in this country in decades. It contains some names that are new and worth knowing and others that are familiar and worth remembering. And when all else fails, it provides, at times inadvertently, some valuable glimpses of Japanese life and culture today, including a tendency to prolong adolescence.
One of its revelations is how much the artistic tradition of extreme artifice, visible in everything from gold-leaf folding screens and lacquer ware to bonsai gardening and ikebana, continues to course through Japanese art, clashing or mingling with reality.
On the down side the show has commitment and space problems. The catalog lacks a case-making essay, resorting instead to interviews with the artists (most of them conducted by Ms. Fuku), as if the curators couldn’t get involved enough to argue for their selections.
Apparently because of a lack of wall space, Masayuki Yoshinaga’s extraordinary photographs of the Goth-Lolita subculture — young women and the occasional young man in hybrid get-ups, like goth black pinafores — is visible only one image at a time, on a large digital screen. This reduces their impact and their contribution to the visual energy of the show. (If you want to see Mr. Yoshinaga’s images hanging on a wall, a nomadic gallery run by Mako Wakasa is showing his work, through Saturday, in a small ground-floor space at 139 Norfolk Street, near Rivington Street, on the Lower East Side.)
“Heavy Light” divides between those photographers who include people in their images and those who don’t. The don’ts, while fewer, have a much higher rate of success.
One of them, Naoya Hatakeyama, quietly gives the show its center of gravity, with large color images that push fairly rugged documentary subjects toward artifice. A photograph of a lime quarry blast shows rock fragments hurtling outward in a nearly perfect orb, and images of Tokyo buildings taken from water level in a concrete-walled river qualify as accidental Cubism. A wall covered with 96 views of Tokyo taken from the tops of high-rises over 16 years shows a world carpeted with mostly gray buildings. Changing light seems to be the subject of the images, which sometimes are taken from the same location. But then you realize that the images have been taken years apart and that they also record the city’s changing architecture.
In colorful but deserted images of an entertainment district near Osaka, Naoki Kajitani shows the Japanese love of artifice in society’s tawdrier sectors in neon signs advertising drink or exotic dancers; a display of pornographic magazines or a shot of a lone but red kiosk plastered with posters.
Risaku Suzuki’s images rarely stress the human presence, although you feel it everywhere, as the images take you along roads and through deserted squares, as if on a kind of journey. The images are from Mr. Suzuki’s continuing “Kumano” series and chronicle an end-of-winter Shinto pilgrimage to a revered mountain near his hometown. Their offhandedness creates the sense of motion, but it also weakens the individual images, which tend not to hold your attention.
As a master of ikebana, Yukio Nakagawa, who was born in 1918, has a long experience with the tension between natural and artificial, and backed into photography while using it to document his work. His arrangements are Surreal temporary sculpture: a long, curved iris leaf filled with rose petals lies like a curved knife blade dipped in blood. A glazed ceramic stiletto (by the ceramic artist Miwa Ryosaku) houses a “fingered citron,” a fruit that looks more like a squid than a lemon. The combination conjures a particularly grotesque version of the Cinderella story.
The whiff of a fairy tale gone wrong becomes overwhelming in the large, gloomy, often violent set-up photographs by Miwa Yanagi. They owe quite a bit to Cindy Sherman and Anna Gaskell, but they are the most convincing work that Ms. Yanagi, something of a veteran on the art fair circuit, has yet produced. Strangely she is the only artist in the show to be favored in the catalog with both an interview and an essay, and by no less than the art historian Linda Nochlin.
The bonsai shoe drops with Makoto Aida, who specializes in making and photographing sculpture that fuses bonsai gardening with young girls. Described as a maverick, Mr. Aida forgoes the catalog interview for a long, amusing and often touching autobiographical ramble that begins, “I am from a yakuza family.” As seen here, his work is not nearly so effective, but might be better if he would stay out of the pictures.
Tsuyoshi Ozawa makes weapons out of vegetables and poses people (mostly women) armed with them in front of buildings, including one of the most photographed of Hiroshima’s bombed-out buildings. Enough said. Midori Komatsubara makes elaborately staged movie-still images based on the popular yaoi (“boys’ love”), a subgenre of Japanese comics, which brim with sexual frisson and technique, but not much else. Kenji Yanobe’s video installation, “Blue Cinema in the Woods,” puts a more satiric spin on childish things, mixing a visit to the zoo with 1950s “duck and cover” instructional films and shots of mushroom clouds. The work also involves Mr. Yanobe’s father, who is an amateur ventriloquist, and a Geiger counter.
The most impressive artists who engage the human form are poles apart. Hiroh Kikai, born in 1945, is a kind of August Sander without a studio. Since 1973 he has roamed the Asakusa district of Tokyo, briefly interviewing and then taking black and white photographs of strangers who pose themselves against the blank walls of the Sensoji Temple. “A tattoo artist and his son,” records a young man with peroxided hair, holding a child with a vertiginous Mohawk who resembles a young witch. A morose-looking man wearing a “love and peace” T-shirt and a skull-and-cross-bones cap provides his own caption: “I’ve always wanted to be different since I was a kid, and I’ve always been knocked around for it.” These images are full of soul and respect. They remind you that artifice understated is style, which seems to come naturally to the Japanese.
Born in 1977, Tomoko Sawada is widely known for photo-booth and yearbook pictures of girls and young women in which, using computers and variations in hair, makeup and expression, she plays each and every character. Here Ms. Sawada is represented by two examples of her “School Days” series, which show groups of girls in their school uniforms lined up in neat rows. Subtle feats of acting that quietly satirize Japan’s homogeneity and emphasis on conformity, these images are initially innocuous. As their single subject emerges from the crowd, they become quite demonic. They have a focus, reserve and ambition that is too often missing from this exhibition.
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