The Best Shows to See During Art Week Tokyo

B. Ingrid Olson | XYZcollective | 26 October – 24 November

B. Ingrid Olson’s darkly psychoanalytical and disorienting installation ‘Hys’ fits perfectly at the bottom of a sharp set of stairs in this basement gallery. ‘Hys’, short for hysteria, mostly occupies a corner of the room – which, the artist writes in the exhibition literature, might equally be described as a crotch or a place in the mind. The work’s sangfroid tone thrums through a group of disagreeable objects. 30 high-speed drill bits protrude from the walls, which have been painted in a tonal variant on the cool grey of the floor. The cast-aluminium Carriage (Impression) (2023–24) evokes the modernist offspring of a chastity belt and Marcel Duchamp’s Female Fig Leaf (1950). The print Draft of Errata (Hys) (2024) shows a body, head cropped, wearing a top shaped with eight-pack abs; the subject’s crotch is covered by underwear, with an ersatz cock made of a condom stuffed with a balloon. Walking into ‘Hys’ is unmooring, like an encounter that forces us to try and make gendered and sexed sense of a body that refuses to cohere.

Ei Arakawa-Nash | The National Art Center, Tokyo | 30 October – 16 December

‘Paintings Are Popstars’ is Ei Arakawa-Nash’s first solo museum survey in Asia – and the first solo show devoted to a performance artist at The National Art Center, Tokyo. It wondrously combines humour, politics and art history in a gesture of generosity and inclusivity. To understand the radicality of the exhibition, it helps to be familiar with the stuffiness of Japanese museums. That Arakawa-Nash has arranged the gallery’s movable walls diagonally, with space between and under them to allow visitors to travel freely between sections, is already an enormous breath of fresh air. That a room dedicated to ‘painting and parenting’ features a baby stroller for his twins (slated for birth around the end of the exhibition) is significant not only for bringing our attention to the difficulty of balancing the labour of childrearing with creative work, but also because the presence of strollers and babies in public are often perceived as a nuisance in Japan. Arakawa-Nash is testing the nation’s social decorum in a national museum. The free admission, the multiple weekly performances and the platforming of other artists’ works constitutes a tactic of ethical worldmaking.

Shizuka Okada | Fig. | 26 October – 24 November

Shizuka Okada’s enigmatic ceramic objects are difficult to place. Modestly scaled, soft-edged and unglazed, excepting some gold details, they evince traces of the hand and hover between abstraction and representation. While the artist’s earlier works referenced the body, most of the pieces here refer instead to structural forms, evoking architecture and construction. In Off-center (2024), for instance, a platform sprouts two tubes with cylinders perpendicular to them that resemble bicycle parts, ornamented with pea-sized gold spheres. In the most puzzling piece, Your Mission is Not Yet Complete (2024), ten spheres the size of golf balls sit on a rectangular slab. Pipe-like forms rest on top of the balls, save for two whose indentations suggest that a pipe has been removed. The works at first glance seem innocuous, even cute. On closer inspection they are confounding, teasing and frustrating the viewer’s desire for narrative.

Kazuo Shiraga & Akira Kanayama | Fergus McCaffrey | 3 October – 28 December

Kazuo Shiraga and Akira Kanayama are best known as members of the Gutai Art Association, one of the first avant-garde art groups to emerge in postwar Japan. Gutai leader Jirō Yoshihara famously challenged members to make something which had never been made before. In 1956, Shiraga established his signature process of painting with his bare feet. A year later, Shiraga’s childhood friend, Kanayama, began making abstract drawings and paintings using a remote-controlled car. In this handsomely presented exhibition, visitors have a chance to view works made between the 1950s and 1990s. Shiraga’s dynamic paintings have impasto marks that crest off the canvas; Kanayama’s canvases are characterized by thin skeins of paint. Shiraga’s post-Gutai Enji (Dark Red) (1983) dramatically captures footprints on open areas of the canvas and the shape of the artist’s heels in areas of built-up paint. Kanayama’s Mar. 8 (1957), a very early remote-controlled-car drawing, is delightful. The machined scribble constitutes a centred cloud of marks, surprisingly framed diagonally by a nearly rectangular form. The exhibition is a great opportunity to consider the works of two artists who have been most noted for their processes.

Maureen Gallace | Misako & Rosen | 26 October – 24 November

At around 25 centimetres square, Maureen Gallace’s oil paintings are small, while her motifs – New England coastal views and rural scenes of houses in warm autumnal light, cool winterish blues and summery greens – are largely unremarkable. Yet, the six canvases in this exhibition command our attention, skirting the humdrum to exude grace and presence. There’s tension in their toying with kitsch. It’s hard to know whether they’re modest or outrageous. What will keep viewers going back and forth between the paintings is their economy, achieved through an impeccable palette and abbreviation of forms, as well as the repose they offer. Though not minimal, these are lean paintings; all distractions have been removed. Gallace’s works are a masterclass in brevity and style.

^{Main image: Ei Arakawa-Nash, NEMESIS PAINTING (PURR … formance!) (detail), 2022, David Zwirner, New York. Courtesy: the artist and David Zwirner, New York; photograph: Santiago Felipe}