Yuko Shimizu in Mexico

Omodaka first new music video in three years. Plum Song takes you on a journey through a re-imagination of the Yoshiwara red light district from the Edo period. [Via Tokyo Mango]

Get a piece of the monster from Motomichi.

From his website:
“Motomichi Nakamura was born in Tokyo, Japan. After graduating from Parsons School of Design in New York he moved to Ecuador where he started working as an artist. He returned to the U.S. in 2000 and currently lives and works in Brooklyn.”

“The subjects in his work often reflect a conflictive nature and can be frightening yet humorous, part human and part monsters. They can also appear at once childlike and sexually deviated. The use of color in both his digital work and in his paintings is limited to black, red and white.”

Dancing Stormtrooper in Japan

Rin Nadeshico has a bunch of girl on girl Japanese art. Checkout her “About Me” translation below from her web site:

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Ujino Muneteru (宇治野宗?)
From Ujino’s web site:
“Tokyo based Muneteru produces work informed by the urban experience, domesticity fused with club and dance music, the interpretation of musical histories, technological capabilities and the sophisticated transformation of domestic and popular ready-made objects into hybrid musical instruments. Muneteru’s practice is concerned with adaptations of language – musical, written and spoken, and the common connection established through a ‘lost in translation’ experience of dance culture. Controlling the performance from a platform of turntables, switch panels and instruments made from found recycled articles including a blender, hair-dryer, electric drill, food processor and bicycle, Muneteru’s sounds trigger responses from the vehicle, which flashes in time with the variable beats.”

Yuka Yamaguchi was born in Kobe, Japan and now lives in Saskatoon, Canada. Yuka says, “I’m an artist. I’m self-taught. I make useless toys and art for adult children.”

WHY are the Japanese couples in Kohei Yoshiyuki’s photographs having sex outdoors? Was 1970s Tokyo so crowded, its apartments so small, that they were forced to seek privacy in public parks at night? And what about those peeping toms? Are the couples as oblivious as they seem to the gawkers trespassing on their nocturnal intimacy?

If the social phenomena captured in these photographs seem distinctly linked to Japanese culture, Mr. Yoshiyuki’s images of voyeurs reverberate well beyond it. Viewing his pictures means that you too are looking at activities not meant to be seen. We line up right behind the photographer, surreptitiously watching the peeping toms who are secretly watching the couples. Voyeurism is us.

The series, titled “The Park,? is on view at Yossi Milo Gallery in Chelsea, the first time the photographs have been exhibited since 1979, when they were introduced at Komai Gallery in Tokyo. For that show the pictures were blown up to life size, the gallery lights were turned off, and each visitor was given a flashlight. Mr. Yoshiyuki wanted to reconstruct the darkness of the park. “I wanted people to look at the bodies an inch at a time,? he has said. [Via “Sex in the Park, and it’s Sneaky Spectators”,NY Times]

“Layers of Voyeurism”, NY Times Slideshow

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