Japanese Culture
A new look at the actions, drawings, and sculpture of the late Japanese artist.
I’ve always enjoyed touring in Japan, not only because of its music but also due to its cultural peculiarities and the unique urban landscapes and soundscapes it possesses.
Two improvisers and composers discuss their involvement in New York’s experimental music scene.
A restored masterpiece unmasks Tokyo’s underground gay subculture of the 1960s
Burn, burn offerings… the fire will purify your body and mind…
“I still seek for eternity, which maybe is like a rainbow-colored butterfly flying away, suddenly in front of your face.”
Filmmakers Andrew Lampert and Stom Sogo, who tragically passed away last year, trade impressions in an unpublished conversation from 2000.
Craig Hubert discusses The Warped World of Koreyoshi Kurahara, a box set gathering five Japanese New Wave films directed by Koreyoshi Kurahara.
The films of Kaneto Shindo, including the now tragically relevant Children of Hiroshima, tell stark tales of life at the margins of society. Zack Friedman considers the ways in which Shindo’s characters manage to survive.
“I think the plastic landscapes that I showed are, in some sense of the word, a kind of a non-site. They’re nowheres-ville landscapes.”
Even more extraordinary than the putative subject of Linda Hattendorf’s debut documentary, an elderly homeless artist, is the fact that Hattendorf started aiming her camera at him long before September 11, 2001.
I nestle with my daughter in her bed in the room painted pink nearly a dozen years ago; half the pink now covered with magazine clippings of this or that star, male and female. Her reading light spots a book in my hands.
Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has made nearly 30 films, all of which have been seen by musician and producer Jim O’Rourke. Lesser known in the US than in Japan, his films are mesmerizing, visually stunning narratives with international relevance.
Chie Fueki’s paintings are both shimmeringly beautiful and richly meaningful, offering many layers of interpretation and allusion and drawing on roots as disparate as Jasper Johns and Japanese bijinga painting.
Shohei Imamura’s 25th film, Dr. Akagi, is a lovely mess of jazzy comedy, kink, and apocalypse that he has declared to be his last movie.
The architect of dreams, filmmaker Peter Greenaway describes his film, The Pillow Book, an ode to Sei Shonagon’s 10th century vernacular sex diary and CD-roms.