We headed over to the 21st Century Modern Art Museum. When you get there, there's a great permanent exhibit called 'Leandro's Pool' which looks like a little swimming pool from above, but there seem to be people in it, then later when wandering round the galleries you come up beneath it and can look up out of it.
The museum is a fantastic building, its a massive one story circle shaped glass building in the middle of Kanazawa. Really interesting design and good to just walk around in.
Anyway, one of the main reasons for going there was to see the exhibitions put on by Yoshitomo Nara, whose work I love. He's sort of artist in residence there at the moment, working with Osaka based design unit Graf on 3 projects going under the name of Moonlight Serenade.
The first one was called 'Voyage Of The Moon', but I couldn't take any pictures inside. The place was a massive dark blue room with a few yellow lights embedded like stars, and in the centre of the room a large hut with a face on top (looking exactly like the one from the picture on the right) where you could queue up to go in, containing a workspace designed by graf with Nara's paintings, drawings, sketches, little models and toys in his signature style (as well as crushed beer cans and written notes) were displayed. It was
fantastic. My favourite was a innocent looking kid with the caption. The world owes me. Fucking world. Wish I could have taken a picture.The second one, 'Dog-o-rama' was two parts: a MASSIVE stuffed dog in the middle of the room called 'Pup-up-the-dog' which people can bring their own things to stuff it with, and 'Pup Patrol' which is full size multicoloured dog costumes hung up around the outside. The idea is that kids can go and wear the dog suits while they go round the museum. The kids look SO CUTE in the outfits, but this photo is off the actual website as I felt it would be a bit weird to ask strangers to let me take pictures of their children.
The final thing he did was to take the outside 'project room' and turn it into a cafe/workshop. Similar to the Voyage Of The Moon hut but on a much larger scale. First he stuck a fake house over the entrance, then made one half a cool cafe and the other half more pinned up drawings, soft toys, graffiti, and this time some photography as well. Was cool to sit in the cafe (which itself had some unusual and cool things, we had "Chocolate Cake(from puddle)" and hot milk cocktails like Malibu and hot milk served as if it they were cups of coffee) and look around. Apparently from time to time he shows up and does work in the workshop, but not when we were there.
Couple of other things from the other main exhibition, called Real Utopia: Tales of the Unlimited. While some things were a little strange (a video of a man repeatedly washing his face with curry), the majority were fantastic. The sort of 'irony' in modern art is something I really don't like, and I loved this exhibition as the exhibits were simple and honest, even when slightly crazy. See the one in the middle below, it was a pitch dark room with regular things in, dining table and chairs, couch and tv, mirror, bench, shelf etc, but all with coloured spots on and a black light. It was really effective! It's called I'm Here, but Nothing, and apparently "generates an endless infinate space, in which all things in the world like the self and other are obliterated, yet exist as each dot in the space."
The exhibitions had great names like 21c. Erotical Flying Machines - A trip to the Galaxy, which was massive spacey drawings and Ladder to Heaven which made use of a dark room, with a blacklight lighting up a white ladder, and positioning of mirrors to make it look like there was a ladder running through the centre of the room that went both up and down as far as you could look, looked fantastic.
They have a room called 'People's Gallery' where apparently different groups can hold exhibitions, and at present it's the graduating students from the Kanazawa college of art. Check some pictures, and and amazing sculpture:
There was a very small exhibition room which was all about monsters, gundams, Godzilla, and stuff like that. I have no idea why it was, although they seemed to have commissioned an anime style drawing of a white dragon attacking the museum itself. The museum was fantastic, and I was so lucky that Yoshitomo Nara's exhibitions coincided with my visit up to that area. Yay for wonderful coincidences.Next we wandered round the famous gardens kenrokuen, and the castle gate, Ishikawa-mon. They were beautiful, slightly similar to the gardens in Okayama a couple of weeks ago (both are in Japan's top 3 gardens) but with more of a 'foresty' feeling.
Then we did a bit of shopping. Kanazawa has some really good shops clustered together on a couple of pedestrian streets (I prefer them to shopping centres/malls, much more personality) and we happily whiled away some more of the afternoon.
Most of the shops were crazy expensive but had good stuff, then we found this great second hand store with loads of eclectic bits at really cheap prices, like jackets for Y4000 (20 quid) and stuff. See the red Wrangler jacket Siobhan is trying on below? So we're browsing that cheap store, and she sees it up on the top of the shelf on a display and asks the guy if she can try it. He laughs, "it's too expensive" but goes and gets the stick to get it down anyway. IT COST Y480,000. Thats £2,400, or 4,800 Mickey Mouse War Dollars. WHAT THE HELL? They guy said it was 'very famous'. After that Bathing Ape seemed positively cheap. (And it is anyway compared to the UK which made me look at it again in a much more favourable light.)
Headed back to Siobhan's town, Uozu, to have dinner and meet up with her friend Josh, before heading out to Toyama, next town along, for a night called LoveBuzz. Was fun, cute barmaid Yuka from 135 the night before was transformed into cool indie pop DJ Yuka:
And we hung out with some of Siobhan's friends and I met her boyfriend Yutaka for the first time (and his mental mate Yusuke):
Traditional 5AM beef bowl, then back on the first train and crash out. Sunday just hung out with some of Siobhan's friends, dinner in a cool cafe she likes, then some arcade and purikura in Uozu. Uozu is really cool, you can see the mountains on one side (high, white mountains as opposed to my little green ones) and the sea on the other. Really nice feeling to it. Looooooooong train journey home, and time to start next week.
Best anti-smoking poster ever:
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