This year’s graduation show at Tokyo’s famed University of the Arts (Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku, popularly known as Geidai) is hands down the best student art show I have ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot. If you are at all interested in art — especially the more ‘traditional’ forms like painting and sculpture — you absolutely must figure out how to get there this week, during business hours, before the show closes. Yes, it is even worth taking the afternoon off work.
If you only have an hour or two, head straight for the university museum, which is showing student work on all of its floors. Skip the new-media installations and the area devoted to paintings in the Japanese tradition; save your time for the all-star work on levels 3 and B2.
On your way out of the museum building, stop by the eight-story building housing the oil-painting studios, which is open to the public all week. Go to enjoy the smell of turpentine and the feel of a dirty, functioning art space as much as the artwork, which is displayed in each student’s studio space so that you can be surrounded by one person’s artwork at a time.
For all of these students, despite the economic downturn, the future looks bright. Most of this work would be highly marketable if only it were for sale, but I guess we’ll have to wait until these ingenues find their way into the ‘corporate jobs’ of the art world: partnership with individual galleries.
Jessica Niles DeHoff
Jessica Niles DeHoff