Entry: Free
A new gallery – the ICN Gallery – has just opened on Leonard Street, with a mission to show “new works which use Japanese culture and sensibilities as their base”. I missed its first exhibition, but managed to catch Ohako, its current show, last week.
Apparently, ohako means two things in Japanese: it can refer to a person's best skill or to a box for preserving tea leaves. For this show 30 Japanese artists working in a variety of disciplines were each given a tea box and asked to use it to showcase their best skill – an ohako inside an ohako.
I liked the idea, but the actual show was a bit disappointing. The 30 little samples of artwork are clearly intended to whet the viewer's appetite, but some of them looked rushed and lazy. Also, while having the artists write statements about their work is not a bad idea, I would advise that for future shows the gallery lets the artists write those statements in Japanese and then hires a good translator. Some of the comments were bizarrely incomprehensible even by the standards of artists' statements.
While the show as a whole wasn't great, there were a few interesting individual pieces. One of my favourites was a papier mâché salamander by Ryo Arai so I'm pleased to see that the ICN Gallery's next show will focus on Ryo Arai and Itaro Yamamoto. It seems that Ryo's papier mâché sculptures are mostly about Japanese folklore and monsters. I've found a few images online that definitely have me looking forward to the ICN's next show.
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