10 Things in Tokyo: December Round-Up

Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan are an Australian husband and wife duo from the Philippines. Since their move to Australia in 2006 the artists have frequently dealt with notions of home and identity as demonstrated here in the large scale rendering of their participative project, “Another Country,” in which local visitors can contribute to the production of cardboard houses to form an expansive installation set across the gallery space. See it at Art Front Gallery until December 23.

Scottish artist Jack McLean displays his recent drawings and expands his darkly comical universe of figures and landscapes. It has the wonderful title of: “It’s a Long Story, in Full Colour, Without a Happy Ending.” Until February 15 at The Container. Also from the UK, Julian Opie casts his minimalist, synthetic brush over the faces of Tokyo in his latest solo exhibition at SCAI The Bathhouse. Until December 20.

Motoyuki Daifu’s recent body of work, “Project Family,” featured images of his parents, sisters and brothers, and occasionally the family cat. He captured the chaos of his atypical Japanese family in an unsentimental, matter-of-fact manner. His new series, “Still Life,” is a collection of unstaged and chaotic arrangements of food and household items on the family’s kitchen table. Showing at Misako & Rosen until January 11.

Here’s an amusing concept: three of Gallery Koyonagi‘s stable, including French artist Sophie Calle and Hiroshi Sugimoto, attempted and failed to sell their art at a local flea market. On display right now are the works they tried to sell as well as a reconstruction of their market stalls. Until January 21.

Yoshihide Otomo is a musician who has moved effortlessly across numerous fields from improvised music to pop, to backing music for films and television, while at the same time he has become a respected figure within the art world holding frequent exhibitions within gallery spaces too. This exhibition within the unique NTT Intercommunication Center inside Tokyo Opera City presents a number of his kinetic sculptures and installations. Until February 22. At the recently re-opened and renovated Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, Rei Naito is holding a solo exhibition of her calm, delicate, almost intangible sculptures. Her gentle works complement the new, pristine white walls of the museum. Until December 25.

Masumi Kura is a photographer who took Garry Winogrand’s photo book Women Are Beautiful from 1975 as her starting point and captured men around town she finds attractive. “Men are Beautiful” is at Yumiko Chiba Viewing Room until December 27. Takashi Homma is a high profile Japanese photographer best known for his calm scenes of everyday life. This exhibition presents ten of his works focusing on Tokyo and New York. Images of single corners and rooms in hotels and skyscrapers are, in Homma’s words, “attempts to capture cities through their own lenses.” Using camera obscura, an early method of capturing an image, he places iconographic landmarks such as water towers alongside the cities’ numerals, typographies and other design elements. At Taro Nasu until December 20.

The National Museum of Art Tokyo is holding a retrospective exhibition of Jiro Takamatsu. He was one of the three members of the influential Japanese artist group Hi Red Center (1963-64). This exhibition presents 50 pieces from the artist; a man who championed freedom and originality in contemporary art from the 1960s until the 1990s. Until March 1.