OBEY & W.K. Interact

After an unforgettable trip a month ago, I'm back in Tokyo this weekend. I'll spend the next three days looking at art and walking around. At night, my sister and I will be dancing in a club, preferably one that's packed and sweaty. Today I hit up Shibuya first, walked around for four hours, and got to four museums. In between, I spent a while in Yoyogi park, one of Tokyo's best cherry blossom viewing spots. The weather/day was perfect.
Called the "East/West Propaganda Project," this exhibition is on display in Tokyo Wonder Site in Shibuya. Shepard Fairey aka OBEY lives in LA and attended Risdee. It was there he started doing his iconic sketches of the French wrestler André Roussinof, known as "André the Giant." He took his drawings to the streets of LA and adapted the message "Obey Giant." The characters in his drawings today are politicians, policemen, and activists. Not surprisingly, the "obey" message is a call–in form of sarcastic propaganda–to do the exact opposite. One of his works is a picture of a menacing policeman with the quote, "I'm gonna kick your ass, and get away with it." He founded the magazine Swindle and is own apparel line Obey Clothing.
W.K. Interact is from France but has lived most of his life in NY. Early on, he showed an interest in depicting the moving body. In high school he would watch the dance class, sketching the dancers in action. His obsession with capturing the fluidity of body movements is prevalent in all of his work today. In a few wall-scale paintings I saw today, bike riders were flying by, the last half of their body blurred by the motion. It looked as would a low-shutter speed photograph.
Of the two, I preferred W.K.'s stuff more, if only because OBEY's tri-color, stationary prints looked lifeless next to Interact's dense, moving compositions. Yet, neither artist was really impressive. Maybe I set my hopes too high. Or maybe these artists are suitable for this environment. Perhaps their stuff only makes sense in its original context–on the street.

Jump to More...

Ba Ra Kei "Ordeal by Roses"

Yukio Mishima was a famously enigmatic author who committed suicide in 1970 at the age of 45. Eikoh Hosoe took these dark, mysterious photos of Mishima just a short time before his death. The props used in many photos symbolize restraint, a theme which is common in Japanese society. Usually the prop restrains Mishima's mouth, which could be taken as a sign of a desire to utter something forbidden.

These pictures were on display at a gallery in Fukuoka a month ago. All are in B&W; in almost all the pictures on display, Mishima is the only model. The house in the background of the picture below was actually the novelist's last residence before his death. The mold and cracking on the once-decadent baroque style front steps belies decay, the smell of death. These two images, in particular, have stuck in my mind–like something you don't want to remember but will because it makes you.

Jump to More...

Hatos

Hato means pigeon in Japanese. Hatos is a collective of artists based in Tokyo who do everything from live painting and music to tee shirt design. I met Rei and So from Hatos last night at an event they did in Fukuoka. Rei did live painting while So played rollicking, droning dub. Live painting is really common at club events here. The finished product hangs, glowing, for people to look at while dancing. I asked So what they were going to do with the art from last night, a 12-foot long canvas with white abstract lines against black. He said I could buy it for 3 million dollars.

Here are a couple of works by the Hatos artists. Their client list is a mile long; the recent tour is sponsored by NorthFace. The close relationship between art and fashion, even mainstream brands like NorthFace, somewhat justifies the exorbitant price of clothes here.

Hatos.org

Jump to More...

Michael Mayer

He came to play at Keith Flack in Fukuoka on Thursday. He started playing at 2:30 and I had to be at work at 8:00. I didn't sleep much, but it was worth it. I got a nice chat in with the head of Kompakt records and danced in front, next to the floor to cieling speaker, to the dark stuff he spun.

He is super nice. We talked for a while about random stuff...spacious dance floors and nice crowds in Japan ('there's no sex on the dancefloor'), playing on the beach in Mexico for New Years eve, incredibly quiet alleys in Tokyo, his favorite place to play (Nitsa in Barcelona), Berlin vs. Cologne, new releases from SuperMayer and Riccardo Voucher, his last trip to Tokyo–he coincidentally had a seat next to Westbam and during 10 hour flight they broke down the history of techno music.

Also on the bill for Mule Musiq's night:
Koss aka Kuniyuki Takahashi
Toshiya Kawasaki

Jump to More...

Out of control China

Photographer Edward Burtynsky recently published China, a collection of pictures documenting the effects of the country's blind devotion to manufacturing. The series of shots on the Three Gorges dam present a post-apocalyptic landscape. They remind me of the land in Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The dam project is the world's largest construction site. In less than 6 months, it has displaced 1.2 million people and destroyed 11 cities.

Above is an apartment complex somewhere in Shanghai. Below is a chicken plant.
His website: http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/

Jump to More...

absolutely edo (tokyo)

Tokyo, like any other huge city, is bustling with people going everywhere. Every face has it's own story; every pair of shoes it's own complaints and fears in life. The downtrodden are many. Long faces reveal the power of the city. It can suck the life out of a man. People who look like they're tired of it all. Nameless hoards that swell and subside organically down the streets and through the stations. Everyone is under the aegis of the rush, and the omnipresent yet invisible energy it creates.

This collective stress comes out at night. The train stations are most exciting after 11:30 pm, an hour before the transportation arteries of the city close. After this a cross-town cab ride is a privilege only affordable to people whose name is on lists. During this hour, Tokyo is drunk, loud, multi-colored, in groups, laughing, soaking up the infectious glee of a Saturday night.

About the clubs we went to on Friday and Saturday night, Womb and Space Lab Yellow:

Space Lab Yellow is tucked deep inside an indistinguishable apartment building off a side street near Aoyama. On the outside, it's a sleepy, mundane building of gray brick with a small car garage. Inside, down two flights of stairs, it's a favorite stop for DJs who play in a different country each week. Just one guy stands outside, in front of a unmarked door, opening it for the people who slowly filter in. The effort to keep it exclusive were bracingly effective: we entered around 1:00, prime club time, and if we didn't have our friend Maru pointing to the door we would have never found it. No people outside, no noise, no nothing.

It was similar outside Womb, except at Womb there is a sign. Yet 12 inch by 6 inch dimly lit letters are not exactly proportional for a club that can fit two thousand people. The sign is mounted at the entrance area, an airport-like tunnel that takes you subterranean and winds around three corners, until you finally reach the entrance. Then you hear the thumping and get the same feeling in your stomach you get when you're a kid about to ride a roller coaster.

Let me go back to the outside of these two places. You're told that clubs in Tokyo are intentionally hard to find. You don't know what that means until you go there. Inside these clubs there are 6 million watts of energy–electric and kinetic and phonic and human–drilling bass tones and radioactive substances through thousands of bodies. Outside you can hear the hum of vending machines across the street. When you leave Womb at a modest 6:00 am, there is a troop of finicky club staff peppered from the door down the street for two blocks. With lightening urgency, they "shhhh" anyone who talks over whisper level. Keep in mind that at this point your ears are so shattered that you can't really hear anything, and the early morning sun makes your eyes feel possum-like.

It makes no sense–sure didn't then, and still doesn't know. There are so many mysteries, questions, curiosities that arise everywhere you go. "What does that sign say" or "why is that guy have on four pairs of shoes" or "how many colors is her hair" or "did he find those clothes on another planet"?

Enigmatic, energizing, magical, mind-boggling. I love it. I didn't want to sleep for fear that I'd miss something. It was 4 days/3 nights of energy-boosting fun that will blast me to a month from now just thinking about it. I'll go back there in late March when my mom comes to Japan.

Jump to More...

Tokyo=Future brains

4 Days in Tokyo
3 Meals from the same Indian restaurant in Shinjuku
2 Nights in A+++ clubs 'til 7:00 AM
1 Happy Patrick

Here's a video I made to show my appreciation for my favorite corner of the earth.

Jump to More...