iTokyo Metropolitan Art MuseumUeno Park
Ways of Reading—How the World Speaks to Us, How We Speak to the World
Free 100th-anniversary thematic show pairing sculpture, photography, text and painting by five artists exploring dialogue with the world.
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Preview: written before the show opened
In 1951 a 19-year-old Shuntaro Tanikawa aimed a twin-lens reflex camera at a mirror and photographed himself. A year later he debuted with the poetry collection Two Billion Light-Years of Solitude. That print, his early handwritten notebooks and radios from his own collection fill one of five sections in this free centenary show.
Each section is one artist and one way of "reading" the world. You start with Giacometti sculptures that belonged to his Japanese friends Isaku Yanaihara and Eiji Usami, sharing a room with Momo Yamanishi's new pinhole photographs, shot in Nepal on a camera she built. Bikky Sunazawa's carvings come from Otoineppu, Hokkaido, including a private collection never shown in Tokyo before. Elena Tutatchikova closes the route with all-new work. The smallest Giacometti pictured, a painted plaster nude, stands 8.9 cm tall, about the length of a Suica card.
It's in Gallery A and C, and Fridays run to 20:00 (last entry 19:30). Closed 7 December and 21 December to 3 January.
Look for
Tanikawa's mirror self-portrait (1951)
The teenage poet holds a twin-lens reflex camera and looks at himself in a mirror, a year before his first book of poems.
Bikky Sunazawa's Tongue of God (1980)
An oak carving just over two metres tall, made in Otoineppu, the Hokkaido village where Sunazawa lived and worked in a closed-down primary school.
Yamanishi's ammonite casts
New pieces joining glass to casts of ammonite fossils she found in Nepal, which she thought of as castings made by time.
Giacometti's Small Standing Nude (c. 1946)
A painted plaster figure 8.9 cm tall, lent by the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura and Hayama.
Tutatchikova's Islands
A new series of ceramic sculptures, shown with reliefs, paintings and drawings in an installation the museum likens to following an imaginary map.
Good for
- Cheap Culture
- Evening Visits
- Going Solo
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Image credits
5
- Ways of Reading—How the World Speaks to Us, How We Speak to the WorldCourtesy of Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum
- Tokyo Metropolitan Art MuseumJoe Mabel, CC BY-SA 2.0
- National Museum of Western ArtJoyofmuseums, CC BY-SA 4.0
- National Museum of Nature and ScienceDaderot, CC0
- Tokyo National MuseumWiiii, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0