HIROSHI NAKAMURA

"Build it and they will come!" That seems to have been the philosophy behind the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Unfortunately they built this spacious venue in the middle of nowhere, far from the nearest station. For this reason the museum is often a sad and lonely place. Despite or possibly because of this, it regularly puts on some of the best exhibitions in Tokyo, including this excellent retrospective of Hiroshi Nakamura, a 75–year–old surrealist artist who uses high school girls in his paintings with the same frequency that Salvador Dali used bendy clocks, coprophilia, and nudes of his wife. Starting out as a politically motivated ‘reportage’ painter in the 1950s, with canvases attacking the US military presence in Japan, Nakamura soon realized it was more fun painting that other kind of uniform – the sailor suit. Nakamura’s schoolgirls, however, are eerie, one–eyed creatures that you wouldn’t want to spend your enjo kosai money on.

Japanzine
March 2007

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