Yesterday was the final day for our portrait show, so after the gallery closed, Hitoshi and I stayed late and “took the show down” and started getting ready for our Winter Sale which starts on Thursday.
We have had a winter sale every year, but this year we have more than 200 items and what is included in our sale reflects some of the shifts we are making in the gallery. Recently we focus on younger Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian and Thai artists, so much of the work is from artists that we are not working with as closely anymore.
Some the names are like a who’s who in Japanese art: Shinichi Nakazawa, Katsunori Hamanishi, Yoshio Imamura as well as a lot of individual works that we have had in the gallery and in our storage area. We have some paintings from Michiko Fujii as well whose work was also quite popular in the gallery and whom we continue to work with. We also have some of the large works from Reishi Kusaka in the gallery on sale too. We love his work but have little space for these large works now.
Some of the Japanese individual works are reduced as much as 50-70% .
From Thailand, we have work from Attasit, Yanawit and Tinnakorn whom I have known since we started the gallery. Attasit has become quite famous for his paintings–and even in this market, they have been getting record prices.
From Indonesia, we have a work from Untung that won the President’s Award in 
Indonesia, a painting from Nengha Sujenah and some works from Agus Purnomo, including one huge painting of numbers.
We have a ton of American works on sale too, including prints that we sold for 20,000 yen framed and will sell for only 5,000 yen. A NY artist visited us last week and saw that we had James Siena and freaked out–saying he is very big in New York. We have four of his prints, including two very large ones, that will also be included in the sale along with Robert Motherwell’s work and work from Katia Santibanez, another rising star in New York.
Gonna run to the gallery now to do more preparation. The sale will open on Thursday at 11 AM in two locations–both in Azabu Juban near Roppongi Hills. One is our regular gallery and the other is a rental space we have for the sale-it’s across from the Gourmet City Supermarket–just look for the big “10″ and we will be there.