"Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan" 

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY
NEW YORK
May 16–September 07

Despite the predominance of cosmopolitanism and mass-media images in 1990s Japanese art, certain artists captured the specificity of contemporary Japanese experience. This exhibition features some eighty photographs and videos by thirteen artists who came of age during the '90s and who work in a vernacular vein. Offering an alternative to the prevailing characterization of today's Japanese art as "neo-Pop," the presentation will show, for example, how the work of Daido Moriyama and Yasumasa Morimura has been transformed in younger artists' work, like Naoya Hatakeyama's and Risaku Suzuki's disorienting landscapes and Miwa Yanagi's and Tomoko Sawada's staged photographs playing with constructions of Japanese female identity.

—Midori Matsui

"The Puppet Show" 

SANTA MONICA MUSEUM OF ART
LOS ANGELES
May 16–August 09

Close on the heels of Team America and Avenue Q, an unlikely puppet-art zeitgeist seemed to be dawning a few years back when marionettes, dolls, and dummies made star turns in works by Christian Jankowski, Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Pierre Huyghe (who cast this writer as a bobblehead manikin). Each of these projects makes a command performance in this show of some forty works made since 1973, alongside contributions by Nathalie Djurberg, Kara Walker, and twenty-one others. Citing Alfred Jarry's 1896 play Ubu Roi as their touchstone, curators Carin Kuoni and Ingrid Schaffner look beyond the use of actual puppets to related artworks exploring themes of the alter ego, miniaturization, and control.

—Scott Rothkopf

Reykjavík Arts Festival 

REYKJAVIK ARTS FESTIVAL
REYKJAVÍK
May 15–June 05

Overseen by artist director Thorunn Sigurdardottir, the Reykjavík Arts Festival's second installment—a constellation of more than thirty exhibitions and events scattered throughout Iceland's capital and across the island—features a survey of contemporary Icelandic art at the Reykjavík Art Museum–Kjarvalsstadir; exhibitions by Monica Bonvicini, Elín Hansdóttir, Finnbogi Pétursson, Steina Vasulka, and Franz West at the National Gallery of Iceland; a solo show by Karl Holmqvist at the Living Art Museum; and "Facing China," a group exhibition of Chinese artists at the Akureyri Art Museum in the island's northern region. For its opening weekend, artist Olafur Eliasson and the art world's ultimate hunter-gatherer, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, will kick-start festivities with an extension of the "experiment marathon" the duo organized last year in London, featuring lively projects by a mix of artists, writers, and scientists.

—Brian Sholis

Pae White 

SCOTTSDALE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
SCOTTSDALE, AZ
May 17–September 07

Taking its subtitle from John Neufeld's 1969 novel about a teenager's descent into madness and the gap between sympathetic youths and misunderstanding adults, "Pae White: Lisa, Bright and Dark," the artist's first US survey, is organized around the duality of "bright" and "dark." This might sound like the curatorial equivalent of mood music for merchandising the Los Angeles artist's assorted projects (mobiles, tapestries, barbecues, birdcages), around forty-five of which, made since 1993, will be on view. But given White's generation-defining tendencies to imbue pop visuals with emotional and psychological implication, to blur high and low in art, craft, and design, and to play in between handmaking, outputting, and outsourcing, what could be more appropriate?

—Christopher Miles