Upcomming / Current Exhibition
Upcomming / Current Exhibition
‘Premonition’ And That Period
“Art is Magic.” It was the mid-1960s when Taro Okamoto made this pronouncement.
Past Exhibition
The Road to the Tower of the Sun
In March 2018, the Tower of the Sun was finally reborn. After half a century of neglect the interior has been restored and reincarnated as a permanent exhibition facility.
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Tower of the Sun 1967–2018 —What did Tarō Okamoto Question—
In March 2018 the Tower of the Sun will finally be reborn. Taking advantage of the opportunity presented by seismic retrofitting work on the tower, the long-neglected interior has been renovated and transformed into a permanent exhibition space.
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Tarō Okamoto’s Tōhoku
In 1957, five years after he discovered Jōmon culture, Tarō Okamoto set out on a trip in search of the true essence of Japanese culture and the first place he visited was the Tōhoku region, where he encountered ‘primeval Japan’.
Tōhoku was a poor region, cut off from the rest of the country in the winter, but there he discovered a ‘spirit of magic’ in dialog with an invisible power, still existed.
Twenty Year’s of the TARO Award/Twenty Enfants Terrible
Left alone following Tarō Okamoto’s death, Toshiko proved much more resilient than many of us had feared. She said that it was her job to transmit a knowledge of Tarō’s work to the next generation and set about achieving this without delay.
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Noritaka Tatehana, Aesthetics of Magic
Taro Okamoto is an exceptional artist who goes far beyond my comprehension and makes me want to think that he himself is the magic. All his life, Taro never sold his work with his own hands. For Taro, resisting the society was his way of interfering with the society with all his might.
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Tarō Okamoto’s Okinawa
In November 1959 Tarō Okamoto visited American administered Okinawa for the first time.
It was to be a well-deserved holiday and even Toshiko, who never went anywhere without her writing materials, set off without so much as a notebook. However, no sooner did they arrive than all thought of a vacation was banished.
The Dignity of Life — Tarō Okamoto’s Jōmon
A fateful meeting in November 1951 resulted in Tarō Okamoto finding a ‘lifelong friend’. Five years after he had resumed his artistic activities in Japan following the war, he happened to visit Tokyo National Museum in Ueno where he encountered a pot dating from the Jōmon period (14,000–300 BC).
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Confronting the Tower of the Sun!
Let’s make the most of this, the greatest roof in the world. That was what I thought as I looked at a model of the vast horizontal line created by this structure and I felt an overpowering impulse to smash through it. I wanted to challenge the graceful plain surface of the vast roof with something absurd.
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The ‘Trees’ of Taro Okamoto
Taro Okamoto felt a great affinity with ‘trees’. The sight of them reaching up to the heavens made him aware of the dynamism of life. He superimposed human ideals on the youthful spreading of their limbs and felt they represented a circuit through which people could commune with heaven.
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