Today I went to “Geisai #11“, an art festival organized by Takashi Murakami’s company Kaikaikiki. It was presented at Tokyo Big Sight, a large exhibition hall near the Tokyo Bay. Artists can rent spaces of various sizes to display their work – whatever they want. The artists are then judged by a panel of international art critics and the winners are boosted quickly into Tokyo art world prominence.
The experience of seeing so much modern art in so many styles was really inspiring. If you can, I highly recommend going to the next festival which will be in March 2009.
Over the course of the show I took as many pictures as I could to catalog my favorite pieces. I took a lot of time editing these photos after the fact to try to reproduce the display environment as closely as possible. Foolishly I did not ask the artists – many of whom were present – what the titles of the pieces were so I made up the titles you see on my Flickr photo stream. Please treat the photos as my interpretation of what I saw. Many of the photos themselves are only small parts of larger works by the artists.
Nothing beats seeing the art in person so next time please try to go yourself!
Click here to visit the full Flickr photo set.
And now for my favorites:
Statue of Child
This beautiful, yet dead, statue was really well made. I had to look at the eyes very closely to see what exactly the artist was trying to convey.
Purely from a photography perspective I think this photo is the best I took today. I feel it accurately reproduces exactly what was shown with clear detail.
Destroyed Tokyo
This artist’s works solely revolved around imaging what Tokyo would look like if it was abandoned by humanity and left to rot for hundreds of years. He incorporated many of the most popular neighborhoods of the Tokyo of today. Really creative work.
This is a tiny part of a huge painting.
Gelatinous Formation
I love the colors and texture.
Girl in White
The contrast between the details and shading in the face and hand versus the clothes and background is key.
Finally comes a picture that I definitely do not call a favorite piece of art but I think some of you may enjoy.
Power Twins (Quadruplets?)
The “power twins” as I call them claim to be cyborgs from the future. I think they made a wrong turn on the way to the anime convention though.