Asuca Hayashi 林明日香 — Song of the Earth, Tokyo (May 5, 2024)
Photo © by Christopher PelhamOn a sunny 5th of May — Children’s Day in Japan — I made my way to what seemed like an unlikely venue, Mifa Football Cafe, for a matinee child/family-friendly concert and luncheon called “Song of the Earth,” organized by the J-Pop singer Asuca Hayashi 林明日香. Mifa is located in Toyosu, one of a series of artificial islands in Tokyo Bay just southeast of the former Tsukuji Fish Market in Tokyo, a strange but fitting location. Both Asuca and the people of Tokyo were charting a new course in pursuit of more healthy, sustainable lives.
The Sound of Freedom: Pianist Hitomi Nishiyama at SUB (Osaka, 4/18/24)
Photo © by Christopher PelhamMy encounter with the well-known — but new to me — pianist Hitomi Nishiyama 西山瞳 at SUB Jazz Cafe, a seminal jazz club in Osaka, took me to places I never expected. Although she was playing jazz standards with a makeshift band, her music and career, characterized by curious changes in direction and exquisite elaborations on connections previously unrecognized, set us free.
KYOTOGRAPHIE KG+ Select: Masahiro Usami’s (宇佐美雅浩) Community Manda-las (April 17, 2024)
Photo © by Masahiro UsamiMasahiro Usami creates art, photographic mandalas, by undertaking a journey, as much relational as through time and space, to understand and capture the essence of a community’s journey in collaboration with that community. In his words, “Each individual photograph [in his long-running mandala series] features a central figure, all of whom come from different regions and standpoints, and then distributed in their environs are the people and things that express the world of that particular figure, just like the form of a Buddhist mandala painting.” His latest depicts the confrontation between citizens and developers over a proposed radical redevelopment of a beloved and historic park in the heart of Tokyo.
Valentina Benigni — Dancing Vulnerability (Off Arles Festival 2024)
Photo © by Valentina BenigniOne of the exhibitions I most enjoyed visiting during my all-too-brief stay in beautiful Arles, France to take in the Les Rencontres D’Arles de la Photographie was not in the festival at all. Instead, Valentina Benigni’s solo exhibition “Dancing Vulnerability” was a part of the concurrent Festival Off Arles.
With 26 exhibitions, some quite large, scattered around Arles, Les Rencontres D’Arles did not leave me much time in my brief stay to check out other shows, many of which I hurriedly passed by. However, Valentina’s exhibition announcement posted on the street featuring a brilliant photograph of what looked like a flamenco dancer with skirt awhirl cried out to me.
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Back to the Garden at Candy Live Jazz in Kyoto (April 17, 2024)
Photo © by Christopher PelhamOn my second night in Kyoto, I went to Candy Live Jazz in Gion to see the trio of Kotono Nishimura 西村琴乃 (alto and soprano sax), Yuka Yanagihara 柳原由佳 (piano), and Ayuko Ikeda 池田安友子(percussion). I was not familiar with any of them, but from the start, I found their set, inspired by the spring season, infectious, rhythmically adventurous, and uplifting.
At times, most notably during Kotono’s number “Milky Way” from her album “Favorable Move,” I felt as if I’d been transported to a landscape untarnished by humans, where dawn is breaking over mountains in a river-fed valley of verdant splendor where you can hear birds singing and take a breath, like in a Thomas Cole painting, a place where you can look up on a clear, moonless night and be awestruck by the majesty of the Milky Way, so far away and yet seemingly so close.
You Don’t Die: The Story of Yet Another Iranian Uprising at Kyotographie, Kyoto (April 16, 2024)
Photo © by anonymous photographerI was excited to explore Kyotographie, the sprawling annual international photography festival in Kyoto. Now in its 12th year, it has become one of Asia’s largest photography festivals. It features 13 curated main exhibitions and more than 100 KG+, KG Select, and Special exhibitions installed in venues large and small all over Kyoto. One of the exhibitions I was most keen to visit was “You Don’t Die — The Story of Yet Another Iranian Uprising,” an exhibition at Sfera culled from 1000s of mostly anonymous images of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising inside Iran, collected and authenticated by Le Monde photo editor Marie Sumalla and Le Monde journalist Ghazal Golshiri. With the assistance of Iranian colleagues Payam Elhami and Farzad Seifikaran, they established the date and location of each photo. Photographs by several professional Iranian photographers inside Iran also appeared in the exhibition.
Facing Death, Finding Oneself at UrBANGUILD, Kyoto (April 16, 2024)
Photo © by Christopher PelhamOn my first night in Kyoto, I attended FOUR DANCERS vol281 at UrBANGUILD, a cafe/bar and multidisciplinary performance space in the heart of Kyoto. Like an old-school club on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, it’s dark, grungy, and covered in flyers. UrBANGUILD presents a wide variety of younger and older artists and draws an extremely diverse audience as well, making it a beloved oasis for contemporary and experimental performing artists in the otherwise more traditional and conservative-minded Kyoto. I came to see two artists in particular, Chizuko Kotani / 小谷ちず子 and Miwako Inagaki / 稲垣美輪子.
In Sendai, A MUSE for Everyone (April 13, 2024)
A visit to MUSE (Music Unites Special Education), a certified NPO founded in Sendai City by pianist Atsuko Nishina in 2001 to increase the opportunities for people with special needs to touch highly artistic music and art and express themselves freely through artistic creative activities, with composer Aya Nishina 仁科彩 and her partner, the visual artist Shimpei Takeda 武田慎平, afforded me the opportunity to understand their creative work more deeply and to recognize that their art and their teaching work, while different in form, have the same purpose, each informed by and expressing the same universal spiritual principles that, in fact, guide all true healing work.
Pianist Eunbi Kim: How to Love Through Deep Listening
Photo © by Eunbi Kim – collage of stills from the official music video for Eunbi Kim's "Saturn Years"This spring I had the pleasure of attending two uplifting events led by genre-fluid pianist Eunbi Kim at the National Arts Club, where she is one of 14 2023/2024 National Arts Club Artist Fellows. Rather than presenting formal concerts, Eunbi (she/her) created a series of gatherings. This approach suited the Club’s intimate spaces and allowed her to work interactively with the audience, sharing how music and mindfulness practice can work together to connect and heal us.
The two gatherings I attended, “How to Love” on March 6 and “Deep Listening” on May 19, each incorporated live music, talking, and visual elements. Eunbi cast the audience as improvisational partners, enabling them to explore the nexus of music and meditation along with her.
Ishinomaki Reborn (April 12, 2024)
Photo © by Christopher PelhamThis large sign, emblazoned with the words...
Nikko (April 11, 2024)
Photo © by Christopher PelhamThe dragon fountain in front of Rinnouji...
Imaishi — April 10, 2024
Photo © by Christopher PelhamAfter one night in Tokyo and a quick lunch...
When the Sun Comes
Photo © by Alex JosephMaya Keren's five-piece band Careful in the Sun is about to embark on its first mini tour, with support from CRS, and I reached out to Maya to learn more about their music and vision, which fuses elements of jazz and pop and draws inspiration from black queer liberation literature.
I first saw them in June 2022 at the M³ Festival, produced by Mutual Mentorship for Musicians. While still an undergrad at Princeton University, Maya (they/them) had participated in M³'s first cohort of duo commission grantees back in the summer of 2020. In this concert, Maya led the band from the piano, and I was struck by their dreamy sound, camaraderie, and joie de vivre onstage. I found myself exhaling, expanding, drawn in and drawn inward. I softened.
Alix Bailey Reminds Us That Painting Is Light and So Are We
Photo © by Alix Bailey 2022, “Alex and Pink” 42” x 60”On November 25, 2023 I had the pleasure of attending the closing reception for "Alix Bailey: Recent Paintings" at The Painting Center in Chelsea. The show, her fourth at The Painting Center, consisted mostly of large paintings of one particular model whom Bailey painted repeatedly throughout the years of the pandemic in the indirect light of her home studio.
The gallery indicated that Bailey began bringing only one model into her home during this time in order to limit the possibility for exposure to COVID during the pandemic. I noted that at least one visiter to her exhibition speculated that her work might have suffered from this limitation. However, I believe that Bailey chose to see it as an opportunity. She stated, "One of the rewards of working so closely with the same model over the years is that I come to know them in a way that adds another layer of meaning to the painting. Observing a person over long periods of time, really seeing them is a way of putting them in the light." As it happened, during this time the model appears to have undergone gender-affirming surgery and, posing nude, allowed Bailey to illustrate the transformation.
But what is even more interesting about these portraits for me — and, I suspect, for Bailey — is not the model’s physical changes but rather Bailey’s ability to evoke the inner light of the model while at the same time capturing the diffuse natural light of her studio and the way that it illuminates everything in the frame.
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