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3 weeks ago | 
theartnewspaper.com | Karen Chernick |Andrew Maerkle |Martin Bailey |Sarah Greenberg
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. So went the 1940s—a decade split into wartime devastation and scarcity, followed by peacetime innovation and abundance. Marking 80 years since the end of the Second World War, a show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art titled Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s plays on the double meaning of the word “boom” as either the rumble of weaponry or the boost of invention and progress.
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2 months ago | 
theartnewspaper.com | Cleo Roberts-Komireddi |Annabel Keenan |Andrew Maerkle
The sight of a rugged, upended fabric forest will interrupt visitors to this year’s IAF. Swathes of hand-stitched material swatches, incorporating clothing and upholstery samples, along with painted panels will be suspended from a structure to form the installation of Imon Chetia Phukan, who is one of IAF’s three artists-in-residence this year. For Phukan the work is both a nod to her homeland in Assam and an expression of her visceral connection to nature.
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Nov 5, 2024 | 
theartnewspaper.com | Andrew Maerkle
Rei Naito is one of the best-kept artistic secrets in Japan. With disarmingly simple materials, from pebbles to balloons to wooden figurines, her installations generate profound experiences of the interconnectedness of the world. Rei Naito: come and live—go and live is one of her most ambitious exhibitions yet, conceived for two venues.
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May 31, 2024 | 
frieze.com | Andrew Maerkle |Azby Brown |Andrew Durbin |Taro Nettleton
Fig. | Chance encounters have shaped a gallery inspired by Tokyo’s past | Andrew MaerkleWhen Takayuki Kubota, the artist who runs the alternative space Fig., tells me that he’s seeking to build an exhibition-making practice that stops short of professionalism, I check myself.
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Apr 30, 2024 | 
artforum.com | Andrew Maerkle
Born in 1900, Sofu Teshigahara was an outsize figure in Japan’s postwar cultural landscape. Founder of the Sogetsu School of Ikebana, Teshigahara shook up the rigid tradition of Japanese flower arrangement through his avant-garde approach and media savvy—and earned great wealth in the process, boasting nearly a million students at one point. His creative output extended to sculpture, painting, and calligraphy; his artistic interlocutors included Salvador Dalí, Isamu Noguchi, and Michel Tapié.
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Apr 23, 2024 | 
frieze.com | Andrew Maerkle
In the arena-like central atrium of the Yokohama Museum of Art, the main venue of the 8th Yokohama Triennale, artistic directors Carol Yinghua Lu and Liu Ding offer an unusual provocation with ‘The Directory of Life’. On a table, the Beijing-based curators have arranged an array of e-readers loaded with texts by contemporary thinkers – from Judith Butler and Kojin Karatani to Wang Hui and artist duo Erik Niedling and Ingo Niermann – inviting you to get lost in thought amidst the riot of art.
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Apr 14, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Andrew Maerkle
From Japan, Ando designed an exhibition for Zeng, the Chinese painter, which generates a sense of surprise and discovery - what LACMA's director calls "a strange, poetic thing."An American institution sponsors an exhibition by a Chinese artist in collaboration with a Japanese architect at a centuries-old Venetian building.
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Jan 11, 2024 | 
frieze.com | Andrew Maerkle
Over the past two decades, Heman Chong has made a name for himself by repurposing conceptual-art strategies to play out fictive scenarios that point to unseen realities and possible worlds. In the performance Memories (2009–ongoing), for instance, participants commit to memory short stories, written by Chong, that will never be published in print.
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Nov 1, 2023 | 
theartnewspaper.com | Andrew Maerkle
Art Week Tokyo’s new curated sales platform AWT Focus invites a guest curator to explore alternate art historical narratives through works from the participating galleries. With over 100 pieces by 64 artists, Kenjiro Hosaka’s Worlds in Balance: Art in Japan from the Postwar to the Present dynamically recontextualises the interweaving strands of art, craft and new forms of expression in Japanese visual culture.
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Oct 30, 2023 | 
theartnewspaper.com | Andrew Maerkle
Art Week Tokyo’s new curated sales platform AWT Focus invites a guest curator to explore alternate art historical narratives through works from the participating galleries. With over 100 pieces by 64 artists, Kenjiro Hosaka’s Worlds in Balance: Art in Japan from the Postwar to the Present dynamically recontextualises the interweaving strands of art, craft and new forms of expression in Japanese visual culture.
