Nakamura Daizaburo (1898-1947) Woman Estate of Selden Washington, 1994; Kobayakawa Kiyoshi (1899-1948) Tipsy Japan, Showa period, 1930 Gift of Philip H Roach Jr, 2001; Round fan advertising Jintan, with photos of Irie Takako and Hamaguchi Fujiko Japan, Showa period c early 1930s

 FEATURING about 70 paintings, prints, textile and decorative arts, the Taisho Chic exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales highlights Japanese modernity, nostalgia and deco encapsulating the clash and embrace of Western modernity and traditional Japan in a period of change.

In the early part of the 20th century, Japan was a place of great change and challenge, nowhere more evident than in the arts of the Taisho and early Showa eras from 1912 to 1930s.

Western-oriented ideologues championed the avant-garde tastes from Europe and America. In turn, nativists sought an antidote to Western materialism in the values of the Japanese past.

The crucial question of the day was: how could one be both Japanese and modern at the same time when modernity was defined as Western?

Art Deco and Impressionism were a great inspiration for the Taisho artists who fused the elements of modernity and nostalgia to create a distinctive aesthetic.

The exhibition has toured the US and Japan. The Art Gallery of New South Wales is its only venue in Australia.

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery Rd, The Domain, until August 3. 10am-5pm daily, Art After Hours every Wednesday until 9pm. $8/$5/family $22.

Portrait of David Wenham 2000, acrylic on canvas, private collection; I wish I was Benny Hill (trouble & squalor), 2004, acrylic on canvas, Collection of Ian and Elizabeth Constable. Images courtesy Yuill/Crowley, Sydney © Adam Cullen

 IS Adam Cullen the bad boy of Australian art?

Adam Cullen's larger than life persona has sometimes overshadowed his art; the exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales brings the focus back to his remarkable paintings and sculptures which brought him to art world attention in the first place.

This is Cullen's first survey show in an art museum. Cullen has a substantial body of work from the last 15 years and has a strong presence in the Sydney art scene, controversially winning the Archibald prize in 2000. While Cullen is best known for his paintings, this exhibition of some 35 works also includes early "grunge" sculptures which introduce key themes in his practice.

Cullen's abrasive yet expressive paintings are a confronting, incisive and at times humorous view of life as we live it now. His often satirical paintings are a form of social allegory, a portrait of our national psyche caught in a suspended stage of development.

Adam Cullen is also an Australian artist. While this is a truism in that Cullen was born, lives and works in Australia, he is also one of the few artists of his generation who works within a "national" idiom.

Cullen paints types, stereotypes and genres that have been identified as "Australian": larrikins, bushrangers, drovers, footy players, beauty queens and antiheroes including criminals, prostitutes and drunkards. He also regularly depicts a particular type of soft-bellied, butt-crack-exposing, balding older male who seems as overly familiar as Donald Bradman or budgie-smugglers.

However, it is not just in this iconography that his Australianness can be located, but in a space he embodies in his work, a fractured space as much psychological as it is physical, one in which broken mirror shards reflect back to us our sense of self and nation as equally fragmentary, shattered and coming apart.

Art Gallery of New South Wales, until July 27, 10am-5pm daily; Art After Hours every Wednesday until 9pm. Free admission.

Bill Viola: The Tristan Project - Fire Woman, 2005 video/sound installation, color high-definition video projection; four channels of sound with subwoofer (4.1), screen size 580 x 326 cm - 11:12 minutes.

 THE works of internationally recognised contemporary artist Bill Viola have been in two exhibitions in Sydney at St Saviour's Church (closed May 23), Redfern, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales (until July 27).

The two exhibitions have been derived from the four-hour video Viola created for a new production of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde director Peter Sellars. It was first presented as The Tristan Project in three separate acts in December 2004, at the Walt Disney Concert Hall with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and went on to receive its fully staged premiere at the Paris Opera in April 2005.

For more than 35 years Viola has been at the forefront of developing the medium of video art as a vital form of contemporary art. His work focuses on universal human experiences of birth, death and the unfolding of consciousness.

While it often draws on the conventions of Western art especially the Medieval and Renaissance periods, the work is informed by Viola's involvement with the spiritual traditions of Zen Buddhism as well as his studies of Christian mysticism and Islamic Sufism. The spirituality of his work perfectly suits it for presentation in houses of worship; accordingly two of the works coming to Sydney were installed at St Saviour's Church, Redfern.

Bill Viola: The Tristan Project - Fire Woman, 2005, and Tristan's Ascension (The Sound of a Mountain Under a Waterfall), 2005, at St Saviour's Church, Redfern, closed on May 23.

Bill Viola: The Tristan Project - The Fall into Paradise, 2005, at Art Gallery of New South Wales, until July 27. 10am-5pm daily, Art After Hours every Wednesday until 9pm. Free admission.

THIS sculpture of pears guards the approach to the National Gallery of Australia which lies at the base of the triangle formed by Commonwealth Ave, Kings Ave and Lake Burley Griffin with the Australian Parliament at its apex. The pears are the work of George Baldesin (1929-1978) who was born in Italy and lived in Australia from 1949 after having lived and worked in England, Italy, Brazil and France. The National Gallery of Australia building was opened in 1982 and houses permanent and visiting exhibitions covering a wide spectrum of Australian and other countries' art.

THE art galleries and museums in Canberra are close enough to Sydney for a day's visit.

Be sure to visit the National Gallery of Australia (check out the current exhibitions) and the National Museum of Australia which is a repository of much Aboriginal art and artefacts.

If visiting the Australian Parliament, you can almost saunter down to the Old Parliament House which houses the Australian Portrait Gallery.

If military art and artefacts interest you, a visit to the Australian War Memorial may be worthwhile.

Students and families with children can also have an enjoyable couple of hours at Questacon, the national science and technology centre.

thesydneyscene is published weekly except in the last two weeks in December and the first two weeks in January.
Copyright 2008 Larry Rivera