Art Here and Now » Japan

Paintings from Living Rice – Inakadate, Japan

Trout Monfalco — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 06:23:00 +0000

Back in 1993, people of Inakadate in northern Japan began planting four types of rice in patterns, which when mature, would form huge images when viewed from above.

Here’s a timelapse of several of the paintings growing into place.

Farmers use computer-aided plotting to design images and determine where the different varieties of rice should be planted.

A close up view

In the years since, other regions of Japan (and people in other countries) have joined in the practice. Meanwhile, Inakadate’s creations have become much more complex and sophisticated. Agreements between farmers have also allowed the artworks to span multiple farms.

View from a paraglider:

Nichitsu Ghost Town, Haikyo of a Mining Town

Trout Monfalco — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:39:43 +0000

Nichitsu was a mining town in Saitama Prefecture, about three hours from Tokyo. At it’s peak in 1965, there were about 3,000 people living there. Now the town is completely abandoned.

Here the Tokyo Times blog posts many Haikyo photographs (廃墟写真, usually meaning photographs of modern ruins) of the ghost town.

Other photographers have also visited Nichitsu, including Michael John Grist, producing these photos of an abandoned Firehouse.

Read more about the history of Nichitsu (Google translation).

Two books by haikyo photographer Shinichiro Kobayashi:
Deathtopia and Ruins.

Photographer Kazuhiko Kawahara

Trout Monfalco — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:56:12 +0000

Collaged photographs form a kaleidoscope of beautiful patterns.

Visit his blog: Pallalink.net
A story from Wired

Haikyo (廃墟写真, Haikyo Shashin) – Japan Photography of Ruins

Trout Monfalco — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 23:55:38 +0000

In the past when I’ve thought about moving to a new place, some cities don’t quite fit me because they aren’t eroded enough. I’m drawn to erosion for some reason, it’s like seeing all of history inside an object or scene. David Lynch said it better – “When you see an aging building or rusted bridge, you are seeing nature and man working together… man has built it and nature has added into it.”

When people build things and then, for whatever reason, abandon them completely, nature quickly starts adding into it. This erosion is captivating, and reveals layers of history, character and texture of the people who left. Sometimes everything is left behind in mid-use, place settings on the tables, machinery prepped to run, a still life frozen for vines and rust to overcome.

Take a look at the great haikyo photographs (????, Haikyo Shashin) on these sites:
Spiral – Research (my favorite is this abandoned amusement park); ruin-Japan; Haimono ruins photo; and Shinichiro Kobayashi.

Two books by haikyo photographer Shinichiro Kobayashi:
Deathtopia and Ruins

Learn Japanese (Rosetta Stone) and travel to Japan (Travelocity).

Japan Ink – Inside the Manga-Industrial Complex

Trout Monfalco — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 23:54:58 +0000

The current issue of Wired is all about manga – how the industry works and how it conquered America.

Two stories:

(pdf) How Manga Conquered the U.S., a Graphic Guide to Japan’s Coolest Export, the story of Manga in the US told using Manga.
Japan, Ink: Inside the Manga Industrial Complex

Read some manga and learn how to draw it in these books, and a favorite from my childhood.

Take a a trip to Japan, it’s beautiful.

Momus – The Norwegian, the Scotsman and the Japanese

Trout Monfalco — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 22:59:48 +0000

Inside Japan (a bit like Berlin), there aren’t really serious art collectors. Inside Japan, people like Murakami and Nara make their money by doing corporate identity (Vuitton, Roppongi Hills) or mass-producing souvenirs… Art is collapsed into the mass market. Galleries are often in department stores, and often show what we’d think of as commercial work; record sleeves, airline advertising. But also there’s the wider perspective that Japan doesn’t really have a tradition of high art separated from design, crafts, practical things, commerce… And there’s no point in accusing Japanese artists of “selling out”. When Nara makes a puppy-shaped alarm clock, he’s distributing his work through the radically flat social structure of Japan much the way Warhol said he’d like to.

A great piece from Momus. Read the whole post on his blog.

A New Wave for Japanese Art

A New Wave for Japanese Art

Trout Monfalco — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 19:50:23 +0000

International art collectors are warming up to a new breed of daring Japanese artists that are no longer beholden to Western styles.

Mentioned in the article is a Contemporary Arts Fund. I’m not sure how well known this is, but there are funds (like mutual funds) created by financial organizations that own artwork instead of stock. A curator or someone else purchases paintings, sculptures or other physical artworks based on their likelihood to increase in value, just like a mutual fund manager might decide what stocks to buy. The artwork is usually purchased across different artists and styles, in a diversification tactic that’s also similar to stocks. When all this is over, the fund is listed on the stock exchange, and prices go up when the artwork value goes up, and they go down when the value goes down. The idea for funds like these came about because when looking at some segments of artwork value, art ownership out performs stock ownership by a wide margin. Of course this is also very risky.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, you have banks and other large financial institutions actually admitting art has great value, and is willing to pay for the work (hopefully paying some artists along the way). On the other hand, except for the curators involved, the people buying into the funds care strictly about the monetary value, and nothing about the aesthetic or cultural value.

Article from Business Week.

New York Sun and Slate on art funds.

Momus – The Norwegian, the Scotsman and the Japanese

Cornelius – Chimes Video

Trout Monfalco — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 23:37:15 +0000

Japanese artist Cornelius often performs in stadiums back in Japan. So I felt lucky to see him in a venue with only about 50 other people. When I first saw the show advertised, I thought it was a mistake because it was in such a small space. Cornelius has been called “The Japanese Beck” because he has many musical influences and sometimes uses collages and samples to weave tracks together.

The show was moving, energetic and hysterical.
It was also filled with chimes (as is his latest album.)

The music and performance were fantastic, but what really made it stand out was the video. Many bands these days project video behind them as they play. Most of the time this comes off as nothing more than a dynamic light cue, or worse, the content of the video distracts or opposes what’s in the music.

Cornelius says the video is a part of the band, like any other instrument. It’s often created right along with a song, in conjunction with the sound and meaning. The result is one of the best I’ve seen combining performance and video. The shape and motion mix with the performers and sound to make something much greater than the sum of its parts. Sometimes we were all in the sky flying with birds, other times mixing with words and color. Each song had it’s own film, and each added meaning, feeling and great visual beauty to the show.

An Interview with Cornelius.

Get Cornelius or Beck.

Tekkon Kinkreet – Universally, Land Developers are Seen as Villains

Trout Monfalco — Tue, 01 May 2007 06:24:55 +0000

Right now, within a 10 block radius of my apartment, there are about 15 condo projects going up. The average price for a condo is about $350,000, double what the average person in the city could afford. Yet they keep rising from the ground, many times taking down or absorbing perfectly good apartment buildings before they begin. The affordable housing disappears, along with the neighborhood character that took 50 years or more to build. That character, which is made up of the people who have lived there for so long, the aesthetics of buildings and the neighborhood businesses who have long done business there, is the most irreplaceable.

Here and in other cities, when developers show up and convince the government that money will be made, that character is quickly forgotten. Whole swaths of neighborhoods are demolished, and new ones are erected in their place. It feels the developers are from somewhere else, and have no notion or respect of what this place is. They seem only interested in making more money.

In Tekkonkinkreet, Treasure Town is a neighborhood which is far from perfect. It’s old and crumbling and full of crime. But even the old villains, the Japanese mafia, at least understand the nature of the place, they are of the neighborhood and respect it.

The main characters of the story are two kids, brothers, named Kuro (Black) and Shiro (White). The kids are homeless and live in an abandoned car. As the older brother grows up in this broken down place, he has to choose between becoming good or bad (Black or White) in order to protect the neighborhood from being torn down by land developers. The land developers, not the mafia, are the big villains. As he makes his choices, he has to leave his little brother behind.

The movie goes into some deep dark places for the older Kuro, but even more so for the little brother. Watching a kid go through so much trauma when he doesn’t understand what’s going on is very sad.

What Kuro and Shiro face is not that different from what Luke faces in Star Wars, it is a classic myth. How do you protect what’s important to you from bad people and bad circumstance without becoming bad yourself? In the darkest circumstances, the choices you face are even harsher. In the real world, unlike a fantasy of outer space, the choices have consequences, for those people you love, and for yourself. Tekkonkinkreet doesn’t provide rosy answers. That’s why it’s such a great film.

Things always change. Buildings and people come and go. But from Anime to Bollywood to 70’s rollerskating movies, what turns developers into villains is not a fear of change, but the sense that things are changing without regard to a greater good, without regard to the whole, change whose purpose is solely personal gain.

The repercussions of that kind of change is now fueling lots of art in many parts of the world.

Get Tekkon Kinkreet

Thank you Richard Florida for giving The Bohemians so much power. Now please tell us – when will we ever benefit from it?