The prolific director / actor / film editor / stand-up comedian / TV presenter / author / poet / painter / sculptor / videogame designer / general no good layabout Beat Takeshi Kitano has taken over the Fondation Cartier in Paris. Described as a “series of dreams”, the show comprises games, inventions, alternative scientific theories, a puppet theatre, paintings, objects and videos in a temporary space designed for the young and young at heart.

In Australia there is currently a retrospective of Kitano’s films for APT6 at GOMA in Brisbane, and his biggest blockbuster Zatôichi is featured at the AGNSW’s current program of Japanese films.

Images courtesy Fondation Cartier

To coincide with the current Utamaro exhibition, The Art Gallery of NSW is presenting a free Japanese ‘floating world’ film series, kicking off this week. Highlights include the 1946 classic Utamaro and his five women (above) as well as Sakuran (below), Kwaidan and many more. Also coming up at the AGNSW is a public screening of Nina Fischer and Maroan El Sani’s film about the man-made, uninhabited island of Hashima, Spelling Dystopia. Full program here.

Soap bubbles, inflatable alter egos and crystal baubles all feature amongst the handful of artists representing Japan in the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, currently showing at GOMA in Brisbane.

A rising star of contemporary Japanese art, Shinji Ohmaki has two standout works featured – Liminal Air, an immersive and highly tactile environment of clever artificial light and thousands of knotted white cords suspended at various heights (second image below); and the dramatic Memorial Rebirth, which comprises 50 bubble machines blowing 10,000 bubbles a minute into the sky (last image below). Like all his work, they are based on notions of infinity and the transience of all things, relating back to traditional Japanese aesthetics with motifs of repetition, emptiness, ephemerality and ambiguity.

One of the most photographed works in the show is PixCell-Elk#2, a 2.5 metre high taxidermied elk covered in glass, acrylic and crystal baubles of various sizes by Kohei Nawa (fourth image below, detail above), a sculptor who is primarily interested in the interaction between form and surface, and how we come to understand what we see.

Examining our relationships with material objects in the virtual/digital realm, PixCell-Elk#2 is part of Nawa’s ongoing ‘PixCell’ series whereby he creates sculptures based on images returned from web search engines. His objects (such as taxidermied animals) are sourced from online auction sites before being enveloped in skins of glass beads which resemble computer pixels as well as molecular structures, magnifying and distorting the object’s form in different parts to various degrees.

The most famous of the Japanese artists included is the superflat illustrator and sculpture Yoshitomo Nara, who has a specially commissioned joint collaboration with the Osaka-based architecture and design firm graf featured. Using reclaimed timbers and found materials, the YNG (Yoshitomo Nara Graf) space houses a selection of Nara’s iconic child-like drawings and objects (third image below).

Also of note is a multichannel video installation from animation and film artist Hiraki Sawa (in collaboration with sound artist Dale Berning) that was commissioned for APT (fifth image below), and an extensive retrospective of director, actor, author, comedian, artist and cult television personality Takeshi Kitano’s directorial film work (first image below).

By no means a broad look at what is happening in contemporary Japanese art, the five Japanese artists here (situated amongst a total of over 100 artists from Asian countries in APT6) are well worth devoting some time to if you are going to be in Brisbane between now until April 2010.

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Images: 1. Kohei Nawa / Japan b.1975 / PixCell-Elk#2 (detail) 2009 / Work created with the support of the Fondation d’enterprise Hermės / Courtesy the artist and SCAI, Tokyo / Photograph: Seiji Toyonaga. 2. Production still from Kantoku: Banzai! (Glory to the Filmmaker) 2007 / Director: Takeshi Kitano / 35mm, colour and black and white, Dolby Digital, 108 minutes, Japan, Japanese (English subtitles) / Image courtesy: Celluloid Dreams. 3.Shinji Ohmaki / Japan b. 1971 /Liminal Air – Descend – 2007 – 09 / Installation at: APT6 / Courtesy: The artist and Tokyo Gallery + BTAP. 4. YNG (Yoshitomo Nara and graf) / Y.N.G.M.S. (Y.N.G’s mobile studio) (detail) 2009 / Commissioned for APT6 and the Queensland Art Gallery Collection with assistance from Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo / Purchased 2009 with funds from the Bequest of Grace Davies and Nell Davies through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery. 5. Kohei Nawa / Japan b.1975 / PixCell-Elk#2 2009 / Work created with the support of the Fondation d’enterprise Hermės / Courtesy the artist and SCAI, Tokyo / Photograph: Seiji Toyonaga. 6. Hiraki Sawa / O 2009 / Commissioned for APT6 / Courtesy: The artist, Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, and James Cohan Gallery, New York. 7. Shinji Ohmaki / Japan b. 1971 / Memorial rebirth 2008 / Installation at: APT6 / Courtesy: The artist and Tokyo Gallery + BTAP

Found on every civilized continent, the spiral has been called the most ancient symbol of all. The damn thing is everywhere: in flushing toilets, in our fingerprints and dna composition, in the very structure of the galaxy. This visually compelling film Uzumaki (’Spiral’) shows the people of Kurozu-cho becoming obsessed with spirals of all forms; a mesmerised student falls to his death at the foot of a spiral staircase, a girl develops hypnotic spiraling hair and a man becomes transfixed by a snail’s shell… They are falling under the spell of the spiral and descending into a twisted vortex of madness. The J-horror film by Higuchinsky is based on a strange manga series by Junji Ito (pictured below) and it is as disturbing as it is beautiful.

Surely the most narcissistic of all mediums, video art since its rise to fame in the 1960s has been closely associated with explorations of the self and, more broadly, the nature of identity. At the forefront of the rise of video art was Takahiko Iimura, an artist whose explorations of selfhood delved deeper than many of his contemporaries and successors have.

His first film, On Eye Rape, was a collaboration with Natsuyuki Nakanishi and was essentially an assertion of the Japanese public’s right to see pubic hair. It was 1962, a time of strict censorship in Japan, and the artists ‘rescued’ an American sex ed. film from a bin in Tokyo before splicing pornographic imagery throughout it and punching holes in most of the frames.

Having spent most of the ‘60s in New York mingling and collaborating with the likes of Yayoi Kusama, Andy Warhol and Yoko Ono, Iimura went back to Japan in the early ‘70s and has continued his work in many parts of the world. His later films and videos became less focused on social criticism and more involved with abstract ideas of language, spectatorship, time and space. While he has remained radically experimental he was always deeply connected with Zen spirituality and traditional Japanese aesthetics; in two films he looked at the Japanese idea of ‘ma’, a unique concept of space and time, which he explored through the famous Zen garden of Ryoan-ji.

Below is a video still from his work AIUEONN Six Features (1993), which comprises distorted faces that visually animate the six vowels of the Japanese language. If you want to see the original (assuming such a thing exists in the land of new media art) The Collected Films of Takahiko Iimura No 1 features AIUEONN along with his Filmmakers documentary (a portrait of his favourite avant-garde filmmakers including Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek, Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, and of course, himself), as well as several other seminal works.

In the traditional, highly refined Japanese artform of banraku puppetry, the three men required to manipulate each puppet are in clear view to the audience. Because the art and the labour are exhibited simultaneously, the artiface of it because an integral part of the performance rather than something to disguise. In a similar way, Dolls makes no attempt to appear natural and is self-conciously highly constructed and stylised.

An ode to the unique form of pupperty, the film opens with a beautiful sequence of a banraku performance and then proceeds to tell three different stories of undying love, the most visually enticing of which is the tale of the young lovers bound by a red chord who roam the changing country side throughout Japan’s four distinct seasons.

It is in these chapters where the film’s designer Yohji Yamamoto really goes all out with his conceptual costumes, creating a surreal and vibrantly colourful world that is untainted by verbal dialogue or other earthly ties. By the end of their long journey the troubled lovers take on the gorgeous traditional kimonos originally worn by the bunraku puppets in the opening sequence, further emphasising their existence as mere ‘dolls’ enacting a well-known love story at the hands of a puppeteer who is manipulating their every move.

While a costume designer usually works within set boundaries of the film to find the most suitable dress for pre-conceived characters, in this case it was evidently the other way around. “We had to adjust locations and stories to match his costumes,” says director Takeshi Kitano, and the aesthetic created by  Yamamoto’s creations is really what gives this strange film its distinct mood.

The highly stylised Kabuki-esque aesthetic and ghostly soundscape of this 1964 cinematic gem create a dream-like state that makes no attempt to be realistic. Director Masaki Kobayashi spent five years in preparation before he started shooting; painting and building the elaborate sets almost single handedly and renting an aircraft hanger to use as a sound stage. The opening credits (see stills above) establish the unforgettable restrained beauty that runs throughout the four stories which make up the portmanteau film.

While often billed as a horror film Kwaidan (‘ghost story’) is slow moving, quiet and gore-free. Taken from the early twentieth century collections of Japanese ghost stories by the Greek/ American writer Lafcadio Hearn (who was so taken by Japanese culture when he arrived there he became a citizen and changed his name to Koizumi Yakumo), it tells the eerie tales Hoichi the Earless, In a Cup of Tea, The Black Hair and Woman of the Snow, which is based on the folkloric character of Yuki Onna.

Speaking of Yuki Onna, a new body of work dedicated to her by Australian photographer Luke Hardy is currently on display at Meyer Gallery in Darlinghurst. His incarnations of the ethereal snow witch were created in Japan and Australia and they have a delicate enigma about them. The show was opened this week by Akira Isogawa and a selection of Hardy’s images are also on display at the Akira boutique in Woollahra for the duration of the exhibition.