Dispatches From My Most Recent Trip
- 14 hours ago
- 10 min read
Updated: 7 hours ago
One of my favorite rituals upon arriving in Tokyo is to pore over the listings of ongoing gallery and museum exhibitions in the city: the more out of the way the better, so that I also get to discover a new neighborhood en route to my cultural adventure. Since Tokyo is eight hundred square miles, this isn't too difficult.
It's not often that I have “down time” during trips to Japan; most days are filled with gallery appointments of one kind or another. This time, over the course of the two weeks that I was there, I did have the opportunity to revisit some of my teenage haunts such as the shopping areas of Shibuya and Ginza. Every time I visit Tokyo, there is so much new construction and so many tourists! Tokyo is an old city but is always in the process of transformation. So, even though I grew up there, I always find a new place to love, proof that you can go home again, as long as you accept that home may look completely different.
Even the area across the street from my father's apartment, once the site of a peaceful, octagonal roofed temple with a spacious garden, is under construction. The monks sold off all the land adjacent to the temple and the octagonal roofed edifice is currently surrounded by backhoes, stacks of metal sheets, and PVC pipes. A giant crane looms in front of the usually uninterrupted view from our apartment’s living room window on the 15th floor.
On my first morning in Tokyo, I made my way to Nezu Station. Situated right opposite the Yayoi Gate to prestigious Tokyo University is the Yayoi-Yumeji Museum. I have long been interested in the poet and artist Takehisa YUMEJI (1884-1934), known for his nihonga illustrations of beautiful women and girls (bijin) of his time. His output was vast: book covers, sheet music, furoshiki wrapping cloths, newspaper and magazine illustrations in addition to paintings and woodblock prints. His women for the most part are languorous, slender coquettes. Their elongated silhouettes are usually draped in traditional kimono; they straddle the Japanese ways of the past with the attempt to emulate Western style.
A few of Takehisa YUMEJI's Beauties
What a contrast with the work of Sayaka KAWAMURA. Those of you who have visited me at an art fair have no doubt seen at least one of her large woodblocks featuring impassive women gazing out at us. When I mentioned to the artist that I was thinking about her depiction of women as opposed to Yumeji's, she replied dryly: "Well, remember, he was drawing women the way men see and idealize women. My women are not trying to be a certain way to please someone. They are just being themselves." Kawamura-san's current editions concentrate on women placed in a horizontal orientation which she believes suits their dreaming state. I'm delighted that we are bringing her to the US next April where she will be an in-person featured artist at my IFPDA Fair booth.
Even though I have only occasionally handled the woodblocks of Japanese - American artist Ansei UCHIMA (1921-2000), his son Anju had mentioned that he was organizing a traveling retrospective in Japan of his parents' work in 2026/2027 and so it was with great excitement that I set off for the Hekinan City Fujii Tatsukichi Museum to view the Ansei and Toshiko UCHIMA Exhibition: “Weaving Colors, Spinning Memories.”
Ansei UCHIMA was born in the US in 1921. He traveled to Japan to study architecture and was there when the Second World War broke out. He remained in Japan during the Occupation, moving away from architecture to painting and printmaking, and introduced American collectors to many of the seminal Japanese printmakers of the time, helped in this by his fluency in both languages. I feel that appreciation of his woodblocks has been overshadowed by his contemporaries' work and hopefully this exhibition and the excellent accompanying catalogue will right this.
His wife Toshiko UCHIMA also made woodblocks and was one of the founding members of the Joryu Hanga Kyokai (the Women's Printmaking Collective, active from 1956-1965.) She eventually made collages and assemblages and is possibly currently better known for those than for her prints. The exhibition also featured many personal photos from the family archive, and it was a great treat to see the artists with their son Anju, and also with the many renowned Japanese printmakers who visited them in the US. The Uchimas moved back to the US in the early 1960s and Ansei taught printmaking for many years at both Columbia and Sarah Lawrence.
Two Ansei UCHIMA woodblocks from his Forest Byobu series featured in the exhibition
Returning to Nagoya Station and waiting in line for a taxi to go on to my next appointment, I suddenly realized that I didn't have the bag containing the exhibition catalogue. I retraced my steps through the crowded train station and, eventually, not wishing to be late, gave up and went on my appointed rounds. The next day however, I was back at Nagoya Station for my return to Tokyo. With a few minutes to spare before my train arrived, I searched out the lost and found office and explained my tale of woe. Within minutes the clerk had located the bag with the catalogue in the back room. Only in Japan!
I also took a side trip to Kyoto and was fortunate enough to visit with three of our artists who live there, all of them American.
Sarah Brayer has been focused on creating luminous works on paper for the past few years, made from handmade mulberry paper. Her visions of moonlit landscapes presented in subtle indigo hues have always enthralled her collectors. She told me that she has really been enjoying her return to experimenting with woodblock technique. Our time together was brief as she was preparing for a trip to the United States, but I enjoyed my tour of some of her large-scale work before we left for dinner to sample yuba, a traditional bean curd product and a Kyoto specialty. The entire meal consisted of yuba prepared in different ways, in soup, as a gratin, with fish, each course more delicious than the previous. I shall return!
The next morning, when it was time to catch up with Daniel Kelly and his lovely wife Tomomi, he was in the throes of completing his newest edition, Thief. The title refers to the fact that Daniel has borrowed an element of Helen Frankenthaler's work for the background, the man in the foreground has been lifted from an old Japanese book page, and the persimmon that said man is holding appears to have been "liberated" as well. Like many artists, Daniel will work feverishly as he labors to complete work for an upcoming exhibition, but my visit gave him a tiny break - a trip to a local shopping mall so that I could buy gifts for my family. It turns out that Daniel is quite a fashionista and made many sage shopping recommendations as I deliberated over my purchases.
Joel Stewart and I had not seen each other for a few years, and it was a treat to stop by his atelier, easily one of the calmest workspaces I have ever visited. As we sat and discussed the state of the world, my eyes kept returning to a few of Joel's watercolors of ceramic vessels: he has a way with capturing light on a glaze that is almost eerie, but that is simply because he is just that technically good. In recent years he has also turned to making ceramics. It will be interesting to see if clay or canvas will take the upper hand in his future creative output. Our conversation was so engrossing that I realized with a start that I had a train to Tokyo to catch and I left without taking a picture, but I do have an image which sums up Joel's technical brilliance perfectly.
A few days later, with the thermometer at 98 degrees and humidity beating all records, Noriko SAITO arrived at the gallery, glowing with the exertion of having hauled a painting and several large etchings on the train from her studio to the gallery. Brimming with cheerful energy as she downed a large glass of iced barley tea, she unwrapped her work. Noriko-san is currently teaching art to high school students and announced that she has picked up a lot of slang words used by. these young people that she is enjoying incorporating in her work. Chewing Gum, one of her newest paintings, has the word “murige” written in katakana in black on the lefthand side. Initially used by video gamers to indicate that they have had enough of a game, this term is gradually entering the language to mean an insurmountable challenge.
She also brought Sound of an Afternoon for me, the last copy of an edition of three, a gorgeous print which won the Grand Printmaking Prize in Serbia in 2015. Noriko-san winced as she remembered how hard she had worked on the powerful image before sending it off to the competition. She shared with me that she had kept working and reworking lines and printing different color variations until suddenly: "it all came together!". We have been handling her work since 2006, and not only do I love her work, but I can honestly say that I have never spent a dull moment in her company.
Tetsuya NODA is in the 'legendary' category of contemporary Japanese printmakers. Born in 1940, his work can be found in major museums in Japan and around the globe. Frequent exhibitions in Japan have showcased his work throughout the years.
Long a beloved teacher at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts, he retired at the then mandatory age of 60 and, since then, refuses to be called sensei, the honorific for a teacher. He lives well outside Tokyo and has a cavernous studio with plenty of room for his various presses. Genuinely humble, sincere, and kind, I can imagine that he must be constantly visited by doting former students. Noda-san has been working for decades on his “Diary” series, using woodblock and silkscreen techniques. Each work is titled with the day on which he took the photograph that inspired the edition. He estimates that he has made over five hundred different editions by now.
For me, one of his most intriguing pieces is Diary: March 13th, 2020. Released during the Covid-19 pandemic, it shows a frontal view of Noda-san and his Israeli wife Dorit, masked and each holding masks that family and friends had sent them. The piece feels of historical and artistic significance, and the first time I saw it I immediately thought that it was a museum piece. Several museums in the US agreed with me and soon all of the prints in the tiny edition of seven had been acquired. Or so I thought. During my visit, Noda-san was happy to tell me that there is one copy left so I will redouble my efforts to find yet another good home for this work.
In recent years, it has become customary to throw a party for the artists when I am in Tokyo. Everyone lives so far apart that it would be impossible to visit each person separately, and the artists enjoy catching up with each other as much as catching up with the Tolman Collection team. This time, we were fortunate to have more than a dozen artists RSVP, and they came from all over Japan for the occasion.
Yoshio IMAMURA brought a new etching that he is entering in a print exhibition in Latvia. Seiko KAWACHI came with updates of the museum being built for him in Numazu, set to open late next year. As I was chatting with Kawachi-san, Kenji NAGAI and his wife walked over to join our conversation. It truly is a small world, and I discovered that Kawachi-san and Nagai-san had attended the same middle school decades earlier. Noriko SAITO and Marie OKADA arrived together and immediately struck up a conversation with Sao TANAKA, a painter visiting from New York. Ryo NISHIMURA, who works in drypoint, wandered over to Yoshikatsu TAMEKANE and Hidehiko GOTO to discuss the current Rembrandt exhibition in Ueno, whereupon Imamura-san chimed in to say that he had just gone to see it before coming to the party. Fuki HAMADA was full of news of the preparations for the Japan Print Association exhibition in October. Emi UCHIDA doesn't often attend, so everyone wanted to catch up with her, and Shin’ichi NAKAZAWA surveyed the activity as he and Katsunori HAMANISHI reminisced.
It was quite a party, and every technique available in the world of contemporary Japanese art was represented. We were delighted to have CWAJ Print Show Co-Chair Jerri Donovan, CWAJ Development Committee Co-Chair Joanna Chinen and Rosina Buckland, curator of the Japanese Collections at the British Museum in attendance, as well as our friend Adeline Yeo, who flew in from Singapore to join in the festivities.
Every day that I was in Tokyo, I spent part of my time at the gallery, where we had the pleasure of being visited daily by both long-time collectors and people who, on their first trip to Japan, wanted to discover contemporary Japanese prints. For the most part I have to happily say that no one ever leaves the gallery empty-handed. Our broad inventory, profound knowledge of technique, and the welcoming atmosphere continue to make the Tolman Collection of Tokyo a wonderful place to visit.
I am so proud that my parents launched this gallery in 1972 and thrilled to continue their legacy internationally, supported by the dedicated Tokyo team.
