Features: Last News

Tom of Finland to a Japanese audience.Not a single gallery, museum or public space in Tokyo shared his enthusiasm for the artist, whose sensual and erotic depictions of the male body reside in the permanent collections of major museums around the world.“I was getting nowhere, and I almost gave up in desperation,” Ohayon, an Israeli-British curator and director of The Container in Tokyo, told the Guardian on the eve of the artist’s first exhibition in Japan.Even the support of the Tom of Finland Foundation, the Finnish embassy in Tokyo and the Finnish Institute in Japan failed to convince potential hosts.For Ohayon, a Tokyo resident for 11 years, the rejections spoke to residual squeamishness about depictions of gay sexuality in Japan,