Skip to content

Category Archives: japan

ALTERNATIVES IN PRINT: PARTNERS

In our distracted times, where we perform on multiple levels simultaneously but lack presence on all of them, a magazine like Partners makes perfect sense. Dedicated to real relationships in the real world, printed on real paper, Partners examines the ties that make up the fabric of our lives: our relations to family, friends, partners. [...]

STORE OF THE MONTH: SHELF / TOKYO

Shelf is one of those little bookstores that are easy to pass by; but for those in the know and on the hunt for rare and special photography books, it is a must. Located in Tokyo’s central Shibuya district, it is to Tokyo what Claire de Rouen would be to London, or 25 Books to [...]

A CHAIR FOR MARUGAME

Martino Gamper first attracted widespread attention in 2007 with the project 100 Chairs in 100 Days, for which he reworked elements of existing  chairs into a collection of charismatic new pieces of furniture. Taking on the ultimate design object of the chair within severe self-imposed constraints in terms of time and material, the results were [...]

POLICING OF OUR BODIES

Terre Thaemlitz has commented on the changes to Japan’s controversial Fuueihou law via a statement on her website. The post responds to the “Declaration On the Future Of Japan’s Club Culture”, signed by 40 Japanese DJs on the same day that the 67-year-old law was officially changed by the Japanese government. She argues that it has “no purpose other than [...]

MOCKED CRIMES

In the (post)digital era, our notion of time and ‘event’ is contradictory. As we all know, the heinous crimes of extremist group ISIS are devastating… The videos they publish online make the evil act, create a new ‘now’. The more we watch the videos, the more people they kill digitally – the event of death [...]

THE ART OF SURREAL FASHION

Taken from the Autumn/Winter issue of Dazed & Confused:
If Sigmund Freud were to pen his 1919 essay The Uncanny today there’s a good chance that Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari’s cult magazine Toilet Paper would appear as an example of something that is simultaneously familiar yet alien. Strange and ambiguous to its core, it bends normality in [...]

GRANFATHER’S ENVELOPES

Just  something that I‘ve missed from the year 2011 and crossed my way shortly ago when I was scanning the internet for envelopes as a part of exhibition concepts or artwork: Works of paper by Kouzaki Hiromu, a japanese carpenter who at the age of 80 began to make envelopes from all sorts of paper [...]

FOOTBALL CULTURE 02

Meanwhile, on yet another side of the planet, or Japan, to be precise, our football-crazed friends at Juuichi – who put together some beautiful exhibits for a mono.kultur-hosted evening during the Euro Cup 2012 – are hosting not one but two exhibitions dedicated to football graphics and paraphernalia. In Tokyo, alas, but then you can [...]

JAPAN SYNDROME

Three years after the tsunami in northeastern Japan and the damage to the nuclear reactor in Fukushima, many people, including a growing number of artists, have got beyond the agony and speechlessness that set in after the disaster. They are starting to recognize that the catastrophe uncovered many hitherto undisclosed rifts within Japanese society, and [...]

MIYAKO ISHIUCHI

Japanese photographer Miyako Ishiuchi has been awarded this year’s prestigious Hasselblad prize. The annual prize has since 1980 been awarded to international photographers such as Henri Cartier-Besson, Boris Mikhailov, Nan Goldin and Sophie Calle. This year’s winner Miyako Ishiuchi has for decades investigated abandoned places and what happens to a city, an apartment, or a [...]