Visiting Japan has been on my list for a long time. In fact, I put it on my destination list for 2020. But the pandemic hit and all our travel got grounded. Without the ability to get on the plane and go explore, all avid travelers needed to find a different way to satisfy their cravings. For me, art (with a little bit of luck and some Instagram-provided inspiration) proved to be a great solution.

After a long lockdown in NYC, museums and galleries finally reopened their doors to visitors in September. Many were ready with excellent shows for starved art lovers who were willing to put on a mask, use lots of sanitizer and socially distance as they moved from room to room. After a bit of trepidation and careful planning — can I find an open slot? Is it better to book a slot at the start or end of the day? When is safest to go? — I joined their ranks. I am so happy I did. As fate would have it, the galleries brought Japan to me!

YOSHITOMO NARA, PACE GALLERY

Yoshitomo Nara has become famous for his strong portraits of characters, many of them children, pondering big emotional life dilemmas, sometimes funny and sometimes slightly sinister. His inspiration comes from a wide range of sources, be it childhood and travel memories or his longtime passion, music. His work encourages you to stop and examine the relationship between introspection and imagination that we all experience. His more recent work also touches on impermanence and temporality - themes that Nara stated exploring after the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011.

Yoshitomo Nara graduated from Aichi University of the Arts with a master’s degree in 1987 and continued his education in Düsseldorf, before settling in Cologne in 1994. His experience allows him to synthesize Japanese and Western popular cultures, a fact that undoubtedly has contributed to his popularity and standing as one of the most popular Japanese artists of his generation. His work spans painting, drawing, photography, large-scale installations, and sculpture in ceramic, bronze, and fiber-reinforced plastic.

There was so much about this show that I loved: the subdued minimalist color palette, the playfulness of the messaging, the reserve and restraint in the drawings themselves. So many of the great things one associates with and adores about Japan. Travel without an airplane ride! Imagine that.

OTANI WORKSHOP AT GALERIE PERROTIN

The name is a bit misleading. Otani Workshop is not a collective of artists but a single sculptor, Shigeru Otani, one of the leading ceramics artists in Japan. The name is symbolic for the artist: he used it early on in his career when taking part in a handmade craft fair in the famous Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, in one of the oldest pottery-producing areas in Japan, in 2005. Using Japanese ceramic traditions and giving them a contemporary twist, his work transports you to a different, almost mysterious place and invites you to let your imagination run wild. Ceramic and bronze figurines, some tiny and others larger than life, children, animals, busts, oversized heads, some upright, others lying on their side. Where do you want to go? A world where dreams, fantasies and tales converge. Or, as the artist says, “We have the word yorishiro in Japanese, which refers to an object representative of a divine spirit. I use my characters to give physical space for some spirits to dwell in.”

The artist crashed onto the global contemporary art scene thanks to another Japanese giant, Takashi Murakami, who organized Otani’s first big art show in Tokyo in 2016. The current show at the Perrotin gallery on the Lower East Side is Otani’s first solo show in New York and highlights works inspired by the artists’ childhood memories. If you can, go see it. It’s up till December 19 and it is definitely worth a visit.