Born just outside the ancient capital of Kyoto in 1975 as the youngest of three children to schoolteacher parents, Mr. Nawa studied at the Kyoto City University of Art, and counts the art of Buddhism and Japan's native Shintoism as among his early ... full story
That's because it's the lavish accompaniment to its new exhibition, “Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art.” Almost every one of those hundreds of pictures, including some in glorious, meter-long fold-out, is an example of the titular Japanese ... full story
Your Portrait was one of Kudo Testsumi's favorite and most frequently used titles. While the word "you" indicated the person looking at the work, and suggested that we are constrained by a variety of established values and conventions, it also referred ... full story
(Around Osaka, escalator etiquette is reversed.) 3. Drink outside, smoke inside. The more enclosed a space is, the more likely you'll be allowed to smoke there. ... If you take a detour down a little unmarked road (most Japanese streets are unnamed ... full story
It collapsed in Hong Kong in May, got stuck under a bridge in Osaka last month, and yesterday exploded in Taiwan. The iconic creation of Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman began to droop at its display site in Taoyuan on Thursday night, victim of a power ... full story
Osaka's National Museum of Art is to present “Your Portrait: A Testsumi Kudo Retrospective”, to run between 2 November 2013, and 19 January 2014. The show's title, “Your Portrait”, is inspired by Kudo's preferred title, with the innocent-looking phrase ... full story
This endeavour, when printed, became his famous and immensely popular work The 53 Stations of the Tokaido Road, and it was to change the whole course of landscape art in Japan and elsewhere as its popularity… its unique vision grew. Hiroshige's ... full story
Her solo exhibition “Meditations on the Body” at the National Museum of Art in Osaka featured 100 photographs. Her most recent project is Women of Japan, clothed portraits of women from many cultures and backgrounds. Laurie and Debbie blog together at ... full story
In each chapter (or story), set in locations as far afield as Venice and Kyoto and in periods from prehistory to today, we encounter artists struggling to create beauty amid the pressures of daily life, and ordinary people striving to concentrate on ... full story
I'm a sucker for a souvenir cushion. The second day that I lived in Dubai, I bought a snazzy little gold-threaded number emblazoned with the face of the UAE's fabulously fierce founding father, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, complete with Ray-Ban ... full story
