Cock and hen toys Exhibition
and the National Kite Festival

Thru Feb.17

The Japan Toy Museum is located in a verdant rural setting about 10km north of Himeji. The museum is housed in six traditional whitewashed warehouses with tasteful folk craft interiors. It has a collection of more than 80,000 items, including Japanese folk toys as well as over 140 toys from around the world. Special seasonal exhibits are held four times a year. This month, toys associated with the New Year Holiday are on display. Toys such as kites, tops and hagoita are on display.

This exhibition juxtaposes the National Kite Festival, which will be held at the Himeji Race Course on January 10th. Not only does the museum showcase kites from all over Japan but since 1975, it holds this special annual festival. The Himeji sky is decorated with over 800 kites every year. The kite display inside the museum is impressive as well, with kites hanging all over the walls and ceilings. Also, in celebrating the Year of the Cock, Japanese folk toys of cock and hen, from north to south, are on display. Also clay figurines and wood-carved cock and hen toys from about 40 countries are displayed. The exhibit focuses on the hopes and desires that people embodied through the toys they made.

Japan Toy Museum, HimeJi
Getting there: From JR Himeji stn, take the Bantan line to Kohro station. Walk 14 minutes East.
Open: 10am-4:30pm, closed Wednesday
Admission: ¥500/¥400/¥200
Tel: 0792-32-4388

Heian opulence: The Twelve Devas and the Landscape Screen

Jan.2 - Feb.13

Buddhist paintings will be exhibited for this special New Year display. The National Treasure Twelve Devas, originally from To-ji Temple, now in the collection of the Kyoto National Museum, and the Landscape Screen (senzui byobu), the only surviving screen painting from this period will be the highlight of the exhibit. Twelve Devas, produced in 1127, represent an invaluable set of highly decorative paintings that was used in the most important of the various New Year events at the Imperial Palace during the Heian period, the esoteric Buddhist ritual Goshichinichi no Mishiho (Austerities after the Seventh Day), which prayed for the emperor's health, national peace, and abundant harvests. Many other hanging scrolls of esoteric images, such as the Dual World Mandalas and the Five Great Myoo, were also displayed in this auspicious ceremony, originated by the Shingon master Kukai (774-835). This elegant set demonstrates the high aesthetic standard for Buddhist paintings used in official ceremonies. Several other Buddhist masterworks, including the National Treasures Red-Robed Sakyamuni Buddha (Jingo-ji) will be on display.

Kyoto National Museum
Getting there: JR Kyoto stn, city bus #206 to Hakubutsukan-Sanjyusangendo-mae stop.
Or Keihan line, Shichijo stn, 7 min walk.
Open: 9:30am-4:30pm, closed Mondays
Admission: ¥420/¥130
Tel: 075-541-1151

Kusama Yayoi Exhibition

Jan.6 - Feb.13

From her early paintings of proliferating nets to soft sculpture and performances after she moved to the United States, Yayoi Kusama has never cease to explore new possibilities in expression, at the forefront of the world art scene for more than forty years.

Born In Nagano Prefecture in 1929, she went to New York in 1957 being one of the forces in the America avant-garde art scene in the 60s. This exhibition presents Kusama's world of "eternal present" featuring recent works and visualizes her fantasy by obsessively accumulating symbolic objects, with infinitely proliferating nets and dots and virtual images in mirrors. There will be seven large-scale installations and the mixture of her past and present works will offer a chance to get a glimpse in Kusama's unique expressive world.

Kyoto Kokuritsu Kindai Museum
Getting there: Keihan Shichijo stn. Okazaki Park
Open: 9:30am-4pm, closed Mondays • Admission: ¥1200/¥800/¥600
Tel: 075-761-4111

Treasures of ancient China
Jan.18 - Mar.27

With its immense history and vast territories, China preserves to this day a huge number of precious cultural relics spanning a period of several millennia. The forthcoming exhibition will present
the essence of this culture in the form of some 150 outstanding artifacts, with the focus on Buddhist art and recent archaeological finds.

The exhibition comprises a comprehensive selection of outstanding works drawn from all over the country and dating from later Han (1st-3rd centuries); through the Three Kingdoms, Wei-Jin-Northern and Southern Dynasties, Sui and Tang periods; and on to the Five Dynasties and Northern Song periods (10th to 12th centuries). Here is a sweeping survey — the first ever — of the changes undergone during a period of some one thousand years by the Buddhist art of China, which exerted such a great influence on the Buddhist culture of Japan. The section devoted to recent archaeo-logical finds presents, from amongst the impressive archaeological discoveries that have been continuing year after year, a careful selection of particularly important works unearthed recently, wit emphasis on pieces never before shown outside China, or at least in Japan.

The National Museum of Art Osaka
Getting there: Subway Yotsubashi line, Higobashi station, exit #3, JR/Hanshin Fukushima stn. By the Chikuzenbashi bridge.
Open: 10am-5pm, Fri until 7pm, closed Mon.
Tel: 06-6201-8003

Kansai Art Listings

ART section compiled by Maki Nibayashi