Check out these amazing manhole covers from Japan. The blog, Pink Tentacle, has the most amazing collection I have ever seen. Perfect combination of art, craft, and public policy.
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Tag Archives: art
Japanese manhole covers as art
Pop artist Yoshitomo Nara arrested for graffiti in New York
According to Japan Today, Yoshitomo Nara, a contemporary Japanese pop artist known for sculptures and paintings of doe-eyed figures, was arrested in late February for tagging graffiti in the Union Square subway station, a New York Police Department official said Monday.
Nara was arrested at 3:10 a.m. on Feb 27 and charged with criminal mischief, possession of graffiti instruments, making graffiti and resisting arrest, detective Martin Speechley told Kyodo News in a phone interview. An official at a New York art gallery where Nara’s exhibits are currently on display said the artist has already been released.
Nara, 49, who lives and works in Tochigi Prefecture, was in New York for a solo exhibition of his work at the Marianne Boesky Gallery that runs Feb 28 through March 28. The online edition of Art in America magazine said Nara was caught tagging a graffiti portrait of two Japanese friends in the subway station and he was optimistic about his two days in lockup.
It was ‘‘a nice experience in my life,’’ the artist was quoted as saying. He said the environment in which he found himself was like something in the movies. Nara emerged on the art scene during Japan’s pop art movement in the 1990s and has held solo exhibitions worldwide. His works are on display at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Struck by The Housekeeper and the Professor
I just finished this book, The Housekeeper and the Professor by, Yoko Ogawa. I won’t try and pretend to write a critique or review of the book. I will say that when I picked it up I thought it was going to be a dramatically depressing story – one that had the potential to keep me up at night worrying about my mortality and what I might have to suffer through as I age. Instead, what I got was a lovely story that you should read. Right now.
We don’t carry this book at Japanistic.com, so you have to buy it somewhere else. Just, please, don’t buy it at Amazon. Go to your local bookseller and buy it there. Or call them and have them order the book.
Here is the publisher’s note:
He is a brilliant math professor, with a peculiarn problem–since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young housekeeper with a ten-year-old son who is hired to care for him. And between them a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms. Though the professor can hold new memories for only eighty mintues, his mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past; and through him, the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the housekeeper and her son. “The Housekeeper and the Professor “is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family where one before did not exist.
TOKYO: Three Films One City
Just learned of the upcoming film – Tokyo. It looks really interesting on a number of levels. First, because it has three short stories directed by fantastic artists (see below); second, because the entire question it raises “whether we shape cities, or if cities shape us” is the same question first raised by the 1980′s graphic novel “Mister X”.
Here is the press release. A movie trailer Tokyo follows.
In TOKYO!, three visionary directors (Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon-ho) come together for an omnibus triptych examining the nature of one unforgettable city as it’s shaped by the disparate people who live, work (and run amok) inside an enormous, constantly evolving, densely populated Japanese megalopolis — the enchanting and inimitable Tokyo.
INTERIOR DESIGN (Michel Gondry).
A young couple tries to set themselves up in Tokyo. The young man’s ambition is clear — to become a film director. His girlfriend, far more indecisive, cannot escape the vague feeling that she’s losing control of her life. Directionless, both are beginning to go under in this vast city until the young woman, utterly alone, becomes the object of a bizarre transformation…
MERDE (Leos Carax)
A mysterious creature spreads panic in the streets of Tokyo by means of his provocative and destructive behavior. This man, dubbed “The Creature of the Sewers” by the media, arouses both passion and repulsion…until the moment he is captured…
SHAKING TOKYO (Bong Joon-Ho)
For more than 10 years, he’s been a hikikomori. He lives shut up in his apartment, strictly limiting all contact with the outside world to an absolute minimum. When a pizza delivery girl faints in his home during an earthquake, the unthinkable happens — he falls in love. Shortly after, he learns that the girl has in turn become a hikikomori. Will he dare cross the threshold that separates his apartment from the rest of the world?
Rhapsody, psychogeography, urban valentine, freak show, mindwalk and many other things, TOKYO! is a fantasy in three movements that will make you see one of the world’s greatest cities — if not any city — with a new point of view.
In the tradition of such films as NEW YORK STORIES, NIGHT ON EARTH, PARIS JE T’AIME and its forthcoming sequel NEW YORK I LOVE YOU, TOKYO! addresses the timeless question of whether we shape cities, or if cities shape us — while in the process, revealing the rich humanity at the heart of modern urban life.
Anime Event at Japan Society in NYC
From the Japan Society:
KRAZY!
The Delirious World of Anime + Manga + Video Games
Organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery
Friday, March 13 — Sunday, June 14
KRAZY! will be New York’s first major show dedicated to the Japanese phenomenon of Anime, Manga, and Video Games—three forms of contemporary visual art that are exercising a huge influence on an entire generation of American youth. The exhibition, organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery, will be presented in an environment designed by cutting-edge architectural practice Atelier Bow-Wow, featuring life-size blowups of popular figures from the worlds of anime and manga within an intriguing sequence of spaces that evoke Tokyo’s clamorous cityscape. Co-curated by leading North American and Japanese specialists, KRAZY! will give visitors a direct experience of new forms of cultural production and offers fresh insight into the interdependence of three art forms of the future.
US/Japan Choreographers Exchange
From MassMOCA:
Saturday, April 25, 2009, 8:00 pm
Club B-10
$10
East meets West in this exciting gathering of choreographers who represent some of the brightest rising stars on two continents – Kyle Abraham (New York), Amy O’Neal(Seattle), Kitamari (Kyoto) and Yukio Suzuki (Tokyo). Working at MASS MoCA for a week, their residency will culminate in a vibrant display of movement traditions intersecting to create something wholly new.
The Exchange is produced by Dance Theater Workshop, Japan Society, and Mass MoCA and the Japan Contemporary Dance Network with funding from the Performing Arts Japan program of the Japan Foundation.
Galleries open until 7:00 PM
