Deeply questioning the theory that recessions increase blog activity, Néojaponisme has been conspicuously unproductive for the last few months. As part of an initiative to get things going again, we have launched a Twitter feed — http://twitter.com/neojaponisme — to bring you even more ideas, observations, links, and one-liners on even more forms of new media. Of course, these tweets are merely compliments to our usual business of art-accompanied essays, so fear not: we can still be long-winded.

Since we have multiple editors, the writer’s name will be in brackets at the front of the tweet: e.g., [Marxy], [Ian], etc.

Please sign up for our feed: http://twitter.com/neojaponisme

The Meeting Modernity series of found photographs is the focus of Néojaponisme’s first traveling exhibition. Recently unearthed outside of the city of Sano in Tochigi-ken, this series of pictures documents Japan as it engaged with modernization and commercial photography in the Meiji and Taishō Periods. The series is comprised of portrait photography in particular.

The exhibition debuts tomorrow at Young Art, a gallery in Los Angeles’ Highland Park.

Meeting Modernity is accompanied by a trio of essays by Ian Lynam, W. David Marx, and Matt Treyvaud reflecting the collection of photographs, the history of Japanese photography, commercial art, and Japanese society.

A limited edition of full-color Meeting Modernity postcard sets has been created for the exhibition and will be available at the gallery.

MEETING MODERNITY
September 13- October 4 2008
Opening Reception:
Saturday, September 13, 2008 7-10pm

More:
Young Art Gallery
747 North Avenue 50 Los Angeles CA 90042

Since we set out to make Néojaponisme an austere “journal” and not a fun-town, what’s-up “blog,” the dialogue has somewhat suffered from our limited ability to talk directly and casually to readers. In order to remedy this problem, we have created a new “meta” blog called METAのTAME (a palindrome of sorts), located at http://meta.neojaponisme.com.

On METAのTAME, we will offer site news, staff news, links to other articles that we think you should be reading, an introduction to Japanese net resources, calls for feedback/requests, and quite possibly, open threads. Although we can’t promise daily updates, we recommend that core readers add METAのTAME to their blogroll or RSS reader. We hope that this new blog-in-blog will increase the amount of content we can provide on a weekly basis as well as create more opportunities to discuss pertinent issues.