Viz Cinema in San Francisco is hosting the Artist Series, a 4-day film festival featuring 6 prominent Japanese artists. The festival starts on March 6th and goes until the 9th. Below you can find the complete schedule of all of the films. Each one runs for about 2 hours. Special festival passes are available for $30. This pass will allow you to access any screening at any time during the entire four days. General admission for individual films are $10 each, and Seniors (62+) and Children (under 12) are $8. More details and trailers for each film can be found at www.vizcinema.com. For those of you in the bay area, I really recommend going and seeing Yayoi Kusama’s film if nothing else.

Saturday, March 6th:
Hisashi Tenmyouya: Samurai Nouveau 1:00 pm
Makoto Aida: Cynic in the Playground 3:00 pm
Katsura Funakoshi: Whispering Gaze 5:00 pm
Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog of Tokyo 7:00 pm

Sunday, March 7th:
Yayoi Kusama: I Love ME 1:00 pm
Hisashi Tenmyouya: Samurai Nouveau 3:00 pm
Makoto Aida: Cynic in the Playground 5:00 pm
Traveling with Yoshitomo Nara 7:00 pm

Monday, March 8th:
Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog of Tokyo 5:00 pm
Katsura Funakoshi: Whispering Gaze 7:00 pm

Tuesday, March 9th:
Traveling with Yoshimoto Nara 5:00 pm
Yayoi Kusama: I Love ME 7:00 pm

Hisashi Tenmyouya is a graphic designer turned contemporary artist. He has a unique style of Neo-Traditional Japanese painting. He has mastered traditional techniques while bringing in motifs taken from tattoo, graffiti, and street gang culture for his own style.

Makoto Aida is known for diverse and controversial works. He works in mediums of paint, video installation, and Japanese manga while tackling controversial subjects like terrorisim, pedophilia, and societal misogyny with cynicism and lowbrow humor.

Katsura Funakoshi is a sculptor that works with camphor wood. He uses simple, warm and gentle figures that can be attributed to the juxtapositions of precise calculations and accidental occurrences. His human-like sculptures are said to draw in viewers with their distant gazes.

Daido Moriyama is a photographer that has been in privacy for a while. He shoots his pictures in black and white most of the time, as well as quick snapshots, out of focus images, and dramatically cropped or tilted images.

Yayoi Kusama is an avant-garde sculptor, painter, and novelist. Her visual style is often characterized by a liberal, excessive use of polka dots and nets to get a so-called “infinity effect.”

Yoshitomo Nara’s work features cartoon-like girls with big heads, chubby faces and slanted eyes. He has captured the attention of the international art world with his characteristic style.