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Showing posts with the label art

Kyoto International Manga Museum

MAMYU, the museum's mascot available for photo opportunities As lifelong comics fan and gold-standard nerd, I'd been looking forward to visiting the Kyoto International Manga Museum . Maybe a little too much. It boasts a collection in excess of 50,000 manga titles which create several walls of manga that stretch over 200 meters throughout the former Tatsuike Primary School. For bibliophiles it might be enough to see the shelves curving around the building or see Japanese visitors of all ages sitting reading their favourites. But the 'international' titles are restricted to a range of translations in the bookshop and a few examples of manga's influence with international books (including Australia's own Queenie Chan). Japanese manga is so popular that it almost doesn't need translation into English. Reading up on the extensive Wall of Manga There are great exhibitions which are bilingual. The Manga Hall of Fame, for example, draws together some of

Visiting Tokyo's new Digital Art Museum

As a stunning visual spectacular, Tokyo's Digital Art Museum  has become the must-Instagram experience for visitors to the city. Its full name -  Building Digital Art Museum Epsom teamLab Borderless - suggests just how big the collaboration must have been to get this 100,000sqm exhibition space happening. It took the Mori Building Group and Epsom to make it work and nothing about it feels like this was a cheap exercise. The collaborative art group teamLab are known for works in Singapore and London but with this permanent space they paint across a big canvas. Rendering butterflies, flowers and charging rhinos onto walls, floors, mirrors and a series of cutomised surfaces, the canvas is truly vast and visitors are warned in advance that this is about discovery - non-sequential, likely to get lost and maddening to visitors wanting linear narrative. This means you can jump in anywhere and experience the exhibition any way you want. The Borderless part of the title is about the s

Brisbane's Asia Pacific Triennial 2009

Many Australians still think of the Queensland capital as a cultural backwater. Although it's Australia's third largest city, the memory of conservative premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen still casts a shadow. Once every three years Brizvegas hosts one of the world's biggest arts events, the Asia Pacific Triennial (the sixth is abbreviated to APT6). Gathering works from Iran to Hawaii, one gallery isn't enough to hold the exhibition so it rambles through the Queensland Art Gallery (known unprosaically as QAG) across to the Gallery of Modern Art (or GoMA to his old army buddies). Entitled People holding flowers , this years coverboys decorate most promo materials, marching across the gallery floor . Chinese artsists Zhu Weibing and Ji Wenyu created the seriously dressed businessmen each holding aloft a lotus flower to play on Mao Zhedong's Hundred Flowers campaign of encouraging artistic opinion. Ironically the flowers and their bearers are identical much like political t

Three Melbourne Art Galleries

If you ask any other Australian what they think of Melbournians, the word 'arty' comes up as often as 'coffee'. We're known for our black skivvies as much as our long blacks. On Saturday we went out on an art safari taking in three very different galleries which confirmed this reputation, but also stretched it to breaking point. First up was Heide gallery – the sprawling property of the Boyd family which is a daytrip in itself. The Modern Times exhibition currently visiting from Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum races through Australian modernism (1917-1967). I was impressed to see the size of Australia’s involvement in this world art movement and even more pleased to hear they've developed a podtour to help you visit. Early in the exhibition a snapshot of Albert Tucker in Jack Kerouac’s New York apartment gives you an idea of Australia’s artistic influence. It’s a good companion to the current Brack exhibition . Swimwear and swim culture are a little over-represen

Is This Your Luggage: A Q&A with Luna Laboo

Ever wondered what people pack when they go away? How do they cram their dreams, their fantasies and their toiletries into a single suitcase? At Is This Your Luggage , the mysterious Luna Laboo opens cases and shows us what's inside. Part art-project, part-philanthropy, totally weird, LL buys lost cases at auction then photographs them for display on the internet in the hope of finding their owners. It's a story that interested me so I did a Q&A and found out that people rarely pack shoes and how hanky folding can show character. Hackpacker: What made you start collecting and photographing other people's luggage? Luna Laboo: Loads of luggage went missing when they opened a new terminal at Heathrow airport. I saw a few news reports on it and started to wonder what happened to it all. I discovered through the internet where it was being sold at auction and went along to buy a case. HP: Are there ever items that you don't photograph when you open up some lugg

Vividly Sydney

Sydney has always shone out, but the Brian Eno exhibition Luminous makes it an artistic reality. As part of the city of Syd's Vivid festival, the sometimes-musician/sometimes-artist is curating an exhibition that will see 77 million images projected over the icon-loaded harbour until June 14th. The light show combines with concerts from Ladytron, Battles and Lee Scratch Perry and other events to put the city centrestage. It makes for quite a spectacle as the Opera House blushes from hibiscus flower to camouflage - the use of khaki making the building anything but invisible. Usually the building leaves a dirty big carbon bootprint. It sucks in the same amount of electricity as a town of 25,000 and uses enough cabling to run from Sydney to Canberra (Australia's token political capital) and back. To address the balance the Smart Light Walk is a tour around the harbour that aims to turn off more lights than it switches on. By wandering through 25 light installations, you can se

Brack is back

John Brack made me move to Melbourne. His iconic painting, Collins St 5pm , takes you into his view of the city as he waited for his friend to knock-off work. But more than his bystander sketching you get a soap opera of faces - from the pinching at the eyes of the Henry Lawson lookalike to the plummy cheeks of the woman pushing behind him. And they're all grimly heading in the same direction. The National Gallery of Victoria is currently running a retrospective of Brack's work that sweeps through his career. There's the brief period in 1956 where he headed out to Flemington to paint 'the sport of kings' but came back only with gargoyle jockeys and undertaker punters. He took on Barry Humphries cross dressing as Dame Edna Everidge and captures the strangeness of both. On the walls is a quote from Brack himself about his charicaturing of people that makes them look sometimes like horror-movie ghouls and sometimes comic book heroines: What I paint is what interests

Espoo Exposé

Another challenge with writing a guidebook is word count. There's an art to narrowing a hotel or restaurant down into two or three sentences, but sometimes you feel like you're not doing a place justice. Just as some ideas are bigger than haiku, some places surprise you and will need more verbage. And so it was with Espoo - there just weren't enough words. It gets dismissed as a satellite of Helsinki, but officially it's Finland's second-largest city and yet maintains its campus feel and boasts the Nokia headquarters. Perhaps all the telecommunications cash has funded the excellent museums housed in the Weegee Centre . The warehouse-like building is the former printing house of Welin & Göös (hence WG and WeeGee) has enough room to host the Espoo Museum of Modern Art, which is better known as EMMA . The industrial-sized space can hold a big exhibition such as the huge paintings of Enzo Cucchi's current exhibition that toys with ideas of scale with tiny i

798 sellout or sucess story?

Is Beijing's famous art district Factory 798 overexposed or a shining light? A feature I did for Lonely Planet wanders through the art district puzzling over what happens when art goes mainstream. Plus one of my all-time favourite taxi drivers.