The second museum we visited on our trip last week was The National Art Center, Tokyo. It has no permanent collection, but was designed as an enormous exhibition space (four floors). The building has a very striking appearance that's a bit hard to fully capture in photos; the first two pictures are the interior and exterior of the building.
We saw this year's installment of the annual "Domani: Art of Tomorrow" show that features works by artists who have returned after studying art abroad on grants. As an expat living in Japan, the concept of re-exploring and re-evaluating your own culture after living abroad is fascinating to me. And, of course, the cultural assimilation I'm experiencing here is ongoing. After being here for nearly four years, I've started to understand the Japanese cultural concept of "cuteness" ("kawaii") rather well, even though I still find some aspects of it rather strange. One of the artists that was featured, Ryoko Suzuki, uses her photography to satirize this cultural concept. She superimposes her own face on photos of dolls and other images that would be considered very cute by this standard, but she exaggerates the physical characteristics and styles of the images even more than is done usually to accentuate their absurdity and comment on gender roles. As is common, no photos were allowed inside, but I'm including two small images of the photographer's works from the show that I borrowed from her website.
We're hoping to return to this venue again for one of the next shows which will focus on 20th century surrealism and include works by Dali and Duchamp.
The final picture is one more photo that I took of ume blossoms.
We saw this year's installment of the annual "Domani: Art of Tomorrow" show that features works by artists who have returned after studying art abroad on grants. As an expat living in Japan, the concept of re-exploring and re-evaluating your own culture after living abroad is fascinating to me. And, of course, the cultural assimilation I'm experiencing here is ongoing. After being here for nearly four years, I've started to understand the Japanese cultural concept of "cuteness" ("kawaii") rather well, even though I still find some aspects of it rather strange. One of the artists that was featured, Ryoko Suzuki, uses her photography to satirize this cultural concept. She superimposes her own face on photos of dolls and other images that would be considered very cute by this standard, but she exaggerates the physical characteristics and styles of the images even more than is done usually to accentuate their absurdity and comment on gender roles. As is common, no photos were allowed inside, but I'm including two small images of the photographer's works from the show that I borrowed from her website.
We're hoping to return to this venue again for one of the next shows which will focus on 20th century surrealism and include works by Dali and Duchamp.
The final picture is one more photo that I took of ume blossoms.
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