'Japan': Reaching for the Unreachable

"Big in Japan," a collaborative exhibition exploring two opposing aspects of contemporary Japanese art at Logan Circle's Transformer Gallery and Georgetown's Shigeko Bork Mu Project, gives new meaning to the phrase "a whole lot of nothing." Each, of course, in its own unique way.

Japanese-born gallerist Shigeko Bork's second-floor space, as it happens, takes its very name from the Japanese word sometimes translated as "nothingness" or "absence," and her two-artist installation, "Meditation Rooms," is correspondingly spare. In the first room you'll find the work of Tokyo-based Yumi Kori, an artist and architect known for her installation work and set design who contributes a series of small shadow boxes made of paper. Lighted only by a single, overhead lamp, each "portable infinity device" (or mon, from the Japanese word for "portal") has a semi-translucent plastic roof through which the box's interior -- about the size of half a shoe box and visible only through a tiny doorway cut in the side opposite the wall -- is illuminated. On one level, the "infinity" refers to the space within: A series of receding, cut-paper doorways pulls the eye inward toward a mysterious, glowing heart, creating the illusion of vastness. In a less literal sense, the boxes are metaphors for our own often untapped depths.

They're like Joseph Cornell boxes, only full of an expansive emptiness that is both unreachable and strangely calming.

Separated from Kori's work by a cloth curtain is the show's second meditation room, featuring the mixed-media paintings of Japanese-born, Washington-based Shinji Turner-Yamamoto. But unlike Kori's boxes, which look inward, Turner-Yamamoto's abstractions look ostensibly outward, as often as not toward the stars.

In such works as the triptych "Constellation" or others from a series of "Nebula" paintings, Turner-Yamamoto evokes an infinity of a very different sort, one embodied in the heavens. Yet his work is just as often earthbound, as in "Sleeping Vishnu Tree," inspired by an uprooted oak. Working in media that include milk, henna, rainwater, beeswax, tree resin and animal glue further roots the artist's poetic work in the here and now, yet like Kori's, his work has both a specificity and universality. In other words, it transcends itself.

Chances are, if you like the work of Kori and Turner-Yamamoto, part of the Japanese tradition that esteems visual elegance and harmony, you're not going to care for "Not Only A, but Also B," Transformer's contribution to "Big in Japan." And vice versa. Fans of Transformer's considerably edgier aesthetic -- which manifests itself in a virtual art explosion of more than 100 (yes, 100) objects that gallery director Victoria Reis facetiously calls a deliberate "[expletive] you" to the art establishment -- might understandably find the work at Mu Project a little tame.

In a storefront space smaller than my living room, guest curator Atsuko Ninagawa has crammed the work of five young Japanese artists almost floor to ceiling and, in the case of Chikara Matsumoto's video animations, on the floor. Of the quintet, two come closest to possessing what old-schoolers might call skill (how quaint!). The first is Aki Goto, with her wall of figurative, if surreally cartoonish, pen and/or pencil drawings surrounding a central painting on paper. The second is Kazuyuki Takezaki, whose handful of colored-pencil drawings of, for example, club kids dancing under a mirror ball, have gestural verve and calligraphic simplicity.

Soju Tao's 44 mixed-media pieces, on the other hand, incorporating xerography, collage, rubber stamps, paint and silkscreen, are more, um, "primitive," to use Reis's word. Not to mention overpriced. At $300 or more a pop, you'd get a far better per-picture deal buying one of the artist's three-ring binders (which feature about 40 individual works for $2,200 and $2,400.) As for Misaki Kawai's acrylic-on-cardboard-and-fabric animal heads, they take the concept of "primitive" and run with it. I've seen better-looking stuff in my son's elementary school art classroom.

Rather than a horrible mistake, it's all a flowering of what Ninagawa, in her curator's statement, calls the Japanese concept of hetauma, an aesthetic in which something thought to be bad or failed can be seen as good. Okay, maybe not literally good, Reis explains, but at least "not as horrible or as lowbrow as expected."

Think punk rock. Think playful inversion. Think twisted, if you must, says Reis, who explains that her artists all have art school pedigrees and that they know exactly what they're doing -- even though they're not doing it very well.

As for what I think, more and more often these days, I'm starting to feel like the kid in the old New Yorker cartoon whose mother keeps insisting that what's on her plate is, in fact, broccoli. Just like that kid, I say it's spinach, and I say to hell with it.

MEDITATION ROOMS Through June 16. Shigeko Bork Mu Project, 1521 Wisconsin Ave. NW, No. 2. 202-333-4119. http://www.muproject.com. Open Wednesday-Saturday from 11 to 5. Free.

NOT ONLY A, BUT ALSO B Through June 16. Transformer Gallery, 1404 P St. NW (Metro: Dupont Circle). 202-483-1102. http://www.transformergallery.org. Open Wednesday-Saturday from 1 to 7. Free.