Coinciding with the Big In Japan! event at CarriageWorks last week, Spooky Action at a Distance is now open at Black & Blue Gallery [read more]

Crazy Hat & Long Ears is a duo formed last year by Tama Arts University students Ryoko Iwata and Saki Akiyama. Their Lewis Caroll-esque video works Our full courses and The law of the jungle on the table feature eating, glorious messiness, jungles on tables and general culinary absurdity [read more]

One day, I meet … Parts 1 + 2, the first works from the collaborative unit Ine wo Ueru hito, are teeming with visual trickery, reconfigured animals and the strangely comforting relentless mundanely of vacuuming [read more]

The new media art festival CREAM makes for a good excuse to get aquatinted with the city of Yokohama, one of Japan’s most interesting new hubs for contemporary art  [read more]

Tetsushi Higashino’s ongoing works in progress include Hydroponic Nose Hair, an attempt to grow a plucked nose hair in water, and Pnoom, which sees him sneak around the neighbourhood on garbage collection day, making temporary stacked towers out of empty cans [read more]

With new energy and expression being granted to everyday things like floors, furniture and air, the allure of Yukihiro Taguchi’s work is that of the ancient art form of puppetry; making the inanimate animate and creating life from lifelessness [read more]

Nagi Noda’s death on September 7 2008 robbed the world of an unbridled imagination that fed on surrealist pop and hilarious, super-kawaii fantasy. Lest we forget. Not that we could even if we wanted to: everything she touched became infused with her idiosyncratic, candy-coloured exuberance, leaving a vivid impression on all who were exposed to her work.

A film director, graphic designer, toy maker, art director and fashion designer, Nagi was born in Tokyo and spent 5 years in New York before returning to Japan in ‘87. She worked as a multi-disciplinary new media artist for various projects and exhibitions; created ad campaigns for clients including the La Foret department store in Harajuku, Nike and Coca Cola; started a fashion label with artist Mark Ryden, and made countless music videos for the likes of Cut/Copy, Scissor Sisters and Japanese pop star Yuki [read more]

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 into the unknown than many of his contemporaries and successors. Having spent most of the ‘60s in New York mingling and collaborating with the likes of Yayoi Kusama, Andy Warhol and Yoko Ono, he returned to Japan in the early ‘70s and continued his experimental work there [read more]

My how the world would be dull without magnetic fields. No microphones, no rockets, no doorbells, no compasses, no cassettes, no credit cards, no magnet space wheels, no passive aggressive fridge notes between housemates, and no liquid magnetic art from Sachiko Kodama [read more]