Calamity Japan: grieving artists respond to quake, tsunami and nuclear crisis

Former editor of Japanese Art Scene Monitor and the current Arts, Entertainment and Features Division Chief at The Japan Times, Edan Corkill looks at the wide variety of sensitive works produced by Japanese artists in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the subsequent Fukashima Daiichi nuclear Power Plant disaster.

More from this Issue

HERE&NOW12

Curator: Katie Lenanton Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth 11 August – 6 October 2012

Sheridan Coleman

Ian Burns: In the Telling

ACMI, Melbourne 24 July 2012 – 20 January 2013

Juliette Peers

Shen Shaomin: The day after tomorrow

The Day After Tomorrow is Chinese-Australian Shen Shaomin’s first solo show in Australia in ten years. His visions of a warped natural world tap into anxieties about civilisation’s ghastly effects. “The space for our lives is shrinking,” Shen said in a recent interview. “The world is more and more dangerous because of the way that we live our lives.”

Christen Cornell

Artrave

Stephanie Britton

Contained fear: Ken & Julia Yonetani's uranium art

Doris McIlwain

9th Shanghai Biennale: Re-Activation

Chief Curator: Qiu Zhijie Co-curators: Boris Groys, Jens Hoffmann, Johnson Chang Shanghai Power Station of Art and other venues 2 October 2012 – 31 March 2013

Maya Kramer

Remarking | Remaking: Contemporary Australian Drawing Connections

Curators: Abdullah M. I. Syed and Wenmin Li Nicole Barakat, Denis Beaubois, Nick Brown, Muamer Cajic, Anie Nheu, Ana Pollack, Nusra Latif Qureshi, Marikit Santiago, Shay Tobin, Teo Treloar Remarking | Remaking Community Project Nicole Barrakat in collaboration with Blacktown Indian Subcontinent Women’s Group Blacktown Arts Centre 20 July – 1 September 2012

Grace Hughes

Khmer pop-lock: saving kids through breaking

It's tough being a refugee, really tough for some. Cambodian Tuy 'KK' Sobil's story begins in a refugee camp in Thailand, travels to the US where he winds up in prison for eight years and more happily shifts to Phnom Penh where he landed as a deportee from the US and has since become an important role model teaching hiphop dancing and music to vulnerable children.

Annemarie Kohn

Merilyn Fairskye: Precarious

Gina Fairley

History of Cultural Responses to Disastrous Storms (1612-2012)

Jennifer Hamilton reviews English and European responses to big storms over time and suggests that even today we need "the more metaphysical dimensions of our existence – the cultural, social and political – to even begin to understand how thunder, lightning, strong winds and an abundance of water falling from the sky can still completely destroy a city and change the course of history."

Jennifer Hamilton

Deadly ennui

Pat Hoffie

Falling through time

In September 2011 at the UTS Gallery in an exhibition called The Fall before the Fall Elvis Richardson and Daniel Mudie Cunningham showed work reflecting on 9/11. Anna Gibbs analyses how their works make this trauma "articulable, shareable and ... to some extent, bearable."

Anna Gibbs

View all articles in this issue