Exhibition JAPANESE ART AFTER FUKUSHIMA – Melbourne until 30 May

Stasis and climate cataclysm explored at RMIT’s After Fukushima exhibition, SMH May 19, 2015 Robert Nelson

VISUAL ART
JAPANESE ART AFTER FUKUSHIMA: RETURN OF GODZILLA
RMIT Gallery
Until May 30

WEATHERING
Rosemary Laing
MoMA at Heide
Until May 31 “….Called Crystal Palace: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nuclear Nations, the works relate our age to the celebration of aesthetic manufacturing in the 19th century.

These chilling pieces hang within Japanese Art After Fukushima, an exhibition of artistic reactions to the melt-down of the Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011. It contains marvellous work, such as Yutaka Kobayashi’s Absorption Ripples – Melt down, melt away, which uses a motif of the traditional Japanese garden, suggesting that radiation remains for millennia but the consciousness of it is transient.

The Fukushima disaster has inspired memorable actions, such as the Finger Pointing Worker, where a man menacingly accuses the Fukuichi live camera by pointing his finger at it. The unknown performer in the viral video is disguised in a radiation protection suit, but it might be Kota Takeuchi, who worked at Fukushima and included the video in an exhibition at in Tokyo.

Despite invoking Godzilla – the mutant monster of destruction awoken after Hiroshima and Nagasaki – the exhibition is collected and thoughtful, including quiet works such as Manabu Ikeda’s rococo drawing of an industrial cooling tower.

Japanese Art After Fukushima is part of an excellent festival, Art + Climate = Change, which gathers local and international artists working with environmental ideas. It has spanned numerous venues across the state and is an important initiative of Guy Abrahams from the non-profit-making Climarte. http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/stasis-and-climate-cataclysm-explored-at-rmits-after-fukushima-exhibition-20150519-gh4scw.html#ixzz3aoP9VAOk