Hiroshi Senju is famous for his large paintings of waterfalls executed in the nihonga (Japanese-style) tradition with mineral pigments on mulberry paper. Here are some alluring human-free photographs of a new museum dedicated to his work in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture. The building is by Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA, who does wonderful things with untreated concrete, curved glass and natural light.

With our present awareness, the arts we have known up to now appear to us in general to be fakes fitted out with a tremendous affectation. Let us take leave of these piles of counterfeit objects on the altars, in the palaces, in the salons and the antique shops. These objects are in disguise and their materials such as paint, pieces of cloth, metals, clay or marble are loaded with false significance by human hand and by way of fraud, so that, instead of just presenting their own material, they take on the appearance of something else. Under the cloak of an intellectual aim, the materials have been completely murdered and can no longer speak to us. Lock these corpses into their tombs. Gutai art does not change the material but brings it to life. Gutai art does not falsify the material …

So begins the Gutai Manifesto, written by Jiro Yoshihara in 1956 (English translation here). In the late 1940s, Gutai co-founder Shozo Shimamoto had started aestheticising holes in stretched canvases (see here), emphasising the corporeal contact made between painter and painting (incidentally, Fontana was developing his Cuts around the same time in Italy).

Pictured here is Gutai artist Saburo Murakami’s action work at the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition in Ohara Hall, Tokyo, in 1956 (below is a reconstruction of the same work in a Gutai retrospective at the 2009 Venice Biennale). Concerning himself with the physical reality of the painter’s canvas, his bodily intervention complicated the relationship between art production and performance.

The Gutai Group’s work around Japan in the ’50s and ’60s anticipated later performance art, happenings and conceptualism in the west, and they had an especially formative influence on the Fluxus movement. They were explicitly concerned with the materiality of art (gutai means ‘tangible’ or ‘concrete’) and, by extension, its material degradation. The manifesto continues:

… what is interesting in this respect is the novel beauty to be found in works of art and architecture of the past which have changed their appearance due to the damage of time or destruction by disasters in the course of the centuries. This is described as the beauty of decay, but is it not perhaps that beauty which material assumes when it is freed from artificial make-up and reveals its original characteristics? The fact that the ruins receive us warmly and kindly after all, and that they attract us with their cracks and flaking surfaces, could this not really be a sign of the material taking revenge, having recaptured its original life? …

“Time is thin around the cause and dense around the effect.”

(Quote from astrophysicist Nikolai Kozyrev / subtitle of On Kawara’s Date Painting for July 26 1972)

Seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, Gregorian months – these measurements of time are arbitrary constructs, marked by the human inventions of clocks and calendars. Other temporal units, like days and years, are marked by cosmic cycles – the rotation of the earth with respect to the sun in the former; the orbit of the earth around the sun in the latter. But even these natural progressions, from day to night and from spring to summer to autumn to winter, depend on the arbitrary arrangement of the solar system. If there wasn’t any stuff in the universe, there wouldn’t be any events – and if there were no events, it seems, there would be no time. Time, in other words, is not a fixed preexisting thing within which events occur – it is, rather, events that form time.

In the 1960s a French speleologist and pioneer in chronobiology named Michel Siffre started retreating to subterranean caves for months on end without any access to clocks or the sun. He found through these studies that psychological and corporeal time would soon become completely out of synch with clock, calendar and geological time. What he estimated to be a two-minute duration was more like five minutes, and sometimes he would have thirty-six hours of continuous wakefulness followed by twelve hours of slumber. Every time he did the experiment, his internal clock would separate completely from the terrestrial diurnal cycle. (See Joshua Foer’s interview with Siffre at Cabinet Magazine, who also published A Minor History Of Time without Clocks).

Many artists in recent decades have made work that deals with the discrepancy between lived time and mechanically measured time. I wrote last month about Nomura Hitoshi’s experiments with duration and temporality, and the artwork that is on everyone’s lips at the moment is Christian Marclay’s twenty-four hour video work The Clock, which just won him the Golden Lion for Best Artist at Venice.

Around the time that Michel Siffre was taking himself underground to get ‘beyond time’, On Kawara was making his first Date Painting, for what would become his ongoing open-ended Today Series. Now comprising of several thousand ‘todays’ from the last four-and-a-half decades, the series is made up of paintings that carry on their surface a clear inscription of their date, and nothing else. Any Date Painting that is not finished before midnight is destroyed. The date is painted horizontally in white across the centre of a monochrome canvas, in the standard language and calendrical style of wherever the peripatetic artist happens to be. If Latin letters aren’t used locally, as in most of Asia, he writes in Esperanto. When finished, each Date Painting is stored in a cardboard box with a clipping from the local paper on that day, and meticulous inventory is kept on each work.

Kawara’s other serial projects have similarly been marked by self-imposed limitations and relentless enumeration. For I Got Up At, he sent generic tourist postcards from wherever he was to friends and colleagues, stamped with the exact time at which he arose that morning. His I Went series comprises of street maps on which the artist has traced his daily steps in red ink. For I Met he typed out the names of all the people he encountered on a given day. His telegram project I Am Still Alive saw him send telegrams to people he knew, announcing that he had not died.

Kawara refuses to give conventional artist bios, instead citing only the number of days he has been alive for (his June 6 1991 bio, for example, read “21,348 days”). In 1969 he compiled a volume of books called One Million Years – Past, in which he had typed out every calendar year between 998031 BCE and 1969 CE. This was accompanied in 1980 by One Million Years – Future, which includes the years from 1981 CE to 1001981 CE. As with his Today Series, the books invested the normally intangible passage of time with a monotonous concrete materiality, and indicated the artist’s strangely unwavering dedication to Sisyphean projects that archive the future flying into the past via the present.

Read Jean-Luc Nancy on time and On Kawara here.

Watch out Gerhard Richter. Kazuna Taguchi makes achromatic oil paintings of images she has assembled from found photographs, before photographing the paintings and then retouching the photographic prints with paint …

Tomoo Gokita painted these defaced faces. He also makes zines, like this.

Since the mid-90s Aichi-based artist Takefumi Ichikawa has worked with ephemeral media like sound, air, incense and milk in his performances and installations around the world. His recent work Aurora, a labyrinthine painting-sculpture incorporating floating fabric and bare light bulbs, is currently on show on the top floor of the abandoned Mansho-S Building in Nagoya’s shopping district Choja-machi, as part of the Aichi Triennale.

With the tools for reproducing images, text and sound now at the tips of all our grubby fingers, Aikawa Masaru has been keeping busy copying popular albums with meticulously hand-painted and drawn cover art and liner notes, along with burnt CDs with all the tracks duplicated using nothing but his own vocals.

The works of obsessively laborious affection are on show in Tokyo at Mori Gallery’s triennial exhibition of new Japanese art, Roppongi Crossing (see my review for Frieze here). Set up to resemble a CD shop, his listening booth comprises dozens of hand-made original fakes of albums by the likes of Kraftwerk, The Ramones, Primal Scream and Patti Smith (there’s even a hilarious a cappella rendering of Beethoven’s Symphony 9) as well as the artist’s helpful ‘tips’ printed on the wall:

- I can not play any instruments.

- There are many copy bands, but I am the best.

- I love music more than pictures and sculptures.

- I like hearing legends about the musicians.

- When I am creating my work, I can be the musicians whom I respect and love.

- I sometimes think that I am cool when I sing song ardently.

- To choose CDs from my favorites, was difficult but fun.

- I think the jackets of Heavy Metal CDs are cool.

- I like “Megadeth” more than “Metallica”.

- The good jacket has good songs on the CD.

- I hate “Greatest Hits”.

- I never buy songs from the “iTunes Music Store”.

- A lot of illegally copied CDs are sold on the streets of Asia .

- I am a Japanese, and a Japanese are good at mimicry.

- I think “iPods” are useful.

- I love the works of Andy Warhol.

- I sympathize with “D.I.Y” mind of the punk / hard core.

- It is possible to listen to my song only in the exhibition.

- The works of CDs are duplications, but nevertheless are myself, and also my original work of art.

Top image by Stefan Riekles, others by Amelia Groom.

Modernism’s doctrine of functionalism put the ornamental in a corner and spat at it, but apparently the decorative is making a quiet comeback. The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo recently brought together ten contemporary Japanese artists under the idea of Neo-Ornamentalism, for an exhibition that had echoes of Buddhist sand mandalas – with Motoi Yamamoto’s temporary 12 by 15 metre ‘salt painting’ on the museum’s floor (below) – as well as European rococo and the repetitive patterns of Islamic arts.

Image credits: 1. Katsuyo AOKI, Predictive dream Ⅸ, 2009, Private collection, Courtesy of Röntogenwerke. 2. Motoi YAMAMOTO, Labyrinth, Installation view at Force of Nature, Artist in Residence, Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, SC, U.S.A. 2006, Salt. 3. Atsuo OGAWA, cutter knife skating, 2009, Engraving on soap. 4. Tomoko SHIOYASU, Cutting Insights, 2008, Paper, TAKAHASHI COLLECTION, Courtesy of SCAI THE BATHHOUSE, Photo by Keizo Kioku. 5. Hiroshi MIZUTA, An apartment in gray, 2009, Oil on canvas, Artist’s collection, Courtesy　of　ARTCOURT Gallery. 6. Junichi MORI, minawa, 2008, Wood, Courtesy of void+. 7. Kentaro YOKOUCHI, book-tear, 2008, Dye and medium, satin, Collection of Museum Contemporary Art Tokyo.

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

Some samples of Akihiko Amano’s work, which according to the artist is about looking at the art of language, and the language of art. His recent solo exhibition 918 at Magical Artroom in Tokyo presented several ink and acrylic paintings depicting his own invented alphabet, described as an attempt to to explore the perceived impossibility of escaping language, even in abstract art.

Akihiko now also has his recent sculptures on show at Tokyo Wonder Site Hongo – alongside the work of Kuribara Morimoto – as part of the latest in the Imaginary Museum of the O-Collection: Magical Museum Tour series (see first image below).

Granting public access to the extensive private collection of the Magical Artroom Director Satoshi Okada, the O-Collection series makes evident the patron’s unique eye for new developments in contemporary art, and his unwavering dedication to supporting young Japanese artists at the very early stages of their careers.

Meiro Koizumi is best known for his video art, but here’s a peek into his collage work. By painting onto magazine pages he changes XXX into G-rated scenes, but the transformation is never quite complete. Whether his women are depicted with pretty dresses in candy-coloured settings or as grey twin towers, there’s always a hint of the image’s naughty past showing through beneath the surface. If censorship was always this artful, I’d be all for it.

Koizumi’s first solo museum exhibition is on at Mori Gallery, Tokyo until November 8.

“But you are still thinking in terms of a life with a real face. The mask does not deceive and is not deceived. How about putting on a new mask, turning over a new leaf, and starting another life?”

(Kobo Abe, The Face of Another)

A look back at a look book from 2006, marking the first collection from Fugahum; a fashion label which frequently crosses over into the realms of  visual art and  instillation.

After 6 years as a designer with Yohji Yamamoto, Asuka Yamamoto formed Fugahum with Akiyoshi Mishima, an artist, art director, graphic designer, film director and VJ. Their work together is based on the notion of a fictional nation named ‘Fugahum’, and their aesthetic nestles somehwere at the boarders of street and fantasy; gothic and futuristic; macarbe and beautiful. An interview with Mishima (whose paintings feature here) about his work and the Fugahum nation can be found here.