Tokyo for Art’s Sake

After our fancy lunch in the Roppongi neighborhood, detailed here, we visited three fine art museums/galleries, back-to-back-to-back (unplanned, as it were) and that will make up this post.

Our first stop after lunch was the Mori Art Museum, located in the aptly named Mori tower, and is a contemporary art museum that hosts different artists for limited time. We did not realize this when we went in, but we saw a familiar art installation on the placard, (like a giant spider), that looked very similar to one we saw in Bilbao a few years earlier:

Louise Bourgeois was the featured artist of the gallery this time, and while much of her art I personally did not connect with, here are a few that I did:

There was a small room with a few pieces from other artists, this one, entitled “A Country without a Door or Windows” stood out based on the meticulous detail of the art.

This visit did not satiate our appetites for fine art, so we continued on, stopping by a small gallery, named the Nichido Contemporary Art Gallery. On display was artwork by a Cambodian artist named Lim Sokchanlina, who put photographs at the bottom of white, five gallon, buckets and then added many different types of materials, and added water from Cambodia, to create these bizarre and very cool art pieces.

Our final museum was the aptly named The National Art Center, Tokyo, and here we were quite satisfied, overwhelmed even, with the amount of paintings and sculptures on display.

There were so many rooms, all like the ones above, that after walking and staring at paintings, we definitely had “museum feet” and had to rest for a while. Here are some of my favorites:

We bought a few souvenirs at the gift shop, which was quite large, and reasonably priced for most things, so we loaded up. After that, we didn’t make it to any more art-specific museums, so that wraps up the Tokyo posts, on to the next adventure!