Japan

FBI returns 22 looted artefacts to Japan

A haul of historic objects looted following the Battle of Okinawa make their way home after almost 80 years

Girls on top: wrestling smackdown draws the Art Week Miami crowds

Sukeban, a group of Japanese women wrestlers, drew the crowds to a skatepark under an overpass at one of Art Week Miami’s more unusual events

Van Gogh’s sunflowers blossom in Japan

The masterpiece is celebrated in a show at Tokyo’s Sompo Museum

Art marketpreview

New tax break to ease international galleries into Tokyo Gendai's inaugural edition

“Japan’s art market is behind where logic dictates it should be,” says the fair's co-founder Magnus Renfrew

SFMoMA acquires architectural capsule from Tokyo's famed Metabolist tower

Architect Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower was demolished last year, but 23 of its distinctive pods were preserved

Asia Week New York bounces back from Covid-19 restrictions with $131m in sales

A print of the "Great Wave" by Hokusai sold for a record-breaking $2.8m at Christie’s during the series of exhibitions and auctions

Relief for Art Week Tokyo galleries as Japan eases travel restrictions

Second edition comes as Tokyo attempts to regain its lost status as an international art hub amid a booming contemporary market and a forthcoming fair

Typhoon-battered Yayoi Kusama pumpkin goes back on display in Japan

Artist’s huge sculpture at Benesse Art Site Naoshima has been restored after being severely damaged last year

Prizesnews

Ai Weiwei and museum architects Sanaa win £100,000 Praemium Imperiale art prizes

The annual award, under the patronage of Japan’s Imperial Family, spans five categories including painting, sculpture and architecture

Issey Miyake, ground-breaking Japanese fashion designer and favourite of museum costume institutes, has died, aged 84

After surviving the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a child, Miyake turned to clothes as a modern, optimistic form of creativity, and revived the use of pleats to create wearable, free-flowing, unisex clothes

Fish scales, nettles and banana leaf? Exhibition of traditional Japanese garments made with unusual materials opens in Minneapolis

A show at the Minneapolis Institute of Art displays more than 120 Japanese textiles made from the stuff of nature

Paris Photo proves that photography is now a woman’s game

Contemporary explorations of femininity that extend beyond the male gaze headline the fair’s latest edition

Exclusive: Rescued from an attic, lost Van Gogh landscape surfaces in Japan—here it is in colour

Vincent's watercolour of a Dutch meadow with cows was exhibited once, in 1903, and is known only from a small black-and-white photograph

a blog by Martin Bailey

Discovered: American couple buys a picture by Van Gogh’s friend Edmund Brooke for $45 in antiques shop

Vincent was fascinated by his Australian colleague’s links with Japan—and together they painted landscapes in the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise

a blog by Martin Bailey
Art marketanalysis

Tokyo aims to take art trade crown from Hong Kong

Can reforms to Japan’s onerous tax system allow Tokyo to replace Hong Kong as the leading art trade hub in Asia, as it was during the “bubble period” of the late 1980s?

Obituariesfeature

Remembering Kenzo Takada, the designer and artist who created the first global, multicultural, fashion brand

In everything he made—clothes, spectacles inspired by his trademark round lenses, home furnishings, parfumerie—Takada's love of fine art remained close at hand

Gauguin and Van Gogh: their shared love of Japan revealed

“Beautiful women” in Gauguin’s rediscovered manuscript are now identified as by Kunisada—Vincent’s favourite Japanese printmaker

a blog by Martin Bailey

Now stuck in Japanese lockdown, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers will not return to UK until next summer

Londoners will have to wait even longer to see the National Gallery’s 60 touring masterpieces

a blog by Martin Bailey

All eyes on Asia: normality is still a long way off as museums emerge from lockdown

Visitor numbers at some of the world’s most popular art venues have nosedived and uncertainty for the future remains

China, South Korea and Japan start to reopen museums after strict coronavirus lockdown

Shanghai's Power Station of Art and Shanghai Museum welcomed visitors today after China's tough measures helped curb the spread of the disease

Tokyo’s treasure house of Impressionist painting reopens as Artizon Museum

Former Bridgestone Museum of Art will have new focus on creativity through the ages after a three-year renovation

Taiwan to host censored Aichi Triennale show

Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art is planning to restage the exhibition, which was partly closed due to violent threats over the inclusion of a 'comfort woman' statue

Eleven artists withdraw or modify their works at Aichi Triennale in ongoing censorship row

Cuban activist Tania Bruguera closes down her exhibit while other artists reconfigure works to reflect the controversy