tokyo this week

lobby of the MoT

art of kiyoshi KURODA

cut paper work of tomoko SHIYOYASU – mind-bogglingly awesome!

nooka!

the creepy work of junichi MORI

team nooka japan: yu YAMADA, myself and yuka SATO.

i am now on the first leg of a month-long business trip. i arrived in tokyo on friday so i would have the weekend to adjust to the jet-lag, but somehow, i'm exhausted today [waking up at 5am is probably the culprit!]. luckily i had 100% energy for my meeting with the PR agency we use here in Japan – got them up to speed on all the collab and event stuff in the US to find synergies and/or similar win-win scenarios relevant to the japan market. in particular, the more i talk about what's going on with the custom nookanooka shows around the world, the more i think we need to package it for a museum show somewhere [after budapest, we will have 50 nookanookas customized by local and international artists!]. curator friends: any ideas? connections with the cooper hewitt in nyc or the design museum in london [or any other ideas welcome]. i'll work the connections i have...

and on the same vein, i was happy to see an artist from the japan custom nookanooka show, atsuo OGAWA, featured in the annual show of new artists at the tokyo museum of contemporary art [known as the MoT, go figure]. the show was pretty amazing, i was blown away by some of the pieces, especially the ceramic work of katsuyo AOKI – glad i caught the show on the last day. you can learn more about the exhibition here. unfortunately, the catalog was sold out, so i had to snap some pictures of the library copy!

there was also a wonderful hussein chalayan retrospective which i also found inspiring. and to make it even more wonderful...they sell nooka in the MoT gift shop!

the newly renovated museum restaurant, content, is quite good – beautiful space, excellent service, but extremely overpriced for being in a municipally funded art museum.