Gets you blushing … Dadiō Moriyama, Untitled (Lip Nine Times), 2001. Photograph: © Daidō Moriyama/courtesy Hamiltons Gallery View image in fullscreen Gets you blushing … Dadiō Moriyama, Untitled (Lip Nine Times), 2001. Photograph: © Daidō Moriyama/courtesy Hamiltons Gallery Eddy Frankel's gallery crawl Art and design Review Crush-worthy photography, camp sci-fi and a centenarian’s florals: five free exhibitions to see A little exhibition of Daidō Moriyama at his artiest and strangest, like Warhol with added filth, is among the best on show in London’s free-entry commercial galleries this week
Prefer the Guardian on Google Daidō Moriyama: Ink ★★★★☆ If it’s a crime to have a crush on an elderly avant garde Japanese street photographer then lock me up and throw away the key, because I have some seriously strong feelings for Daidō Moriyama . His ultra-confrontational, high contrast, aggressive take on photography just gets me blushing, what can I say.
This little exhibition is Moriyama at his artiest and strangest. In the 1960s he discovered Warhol and became obsessed. The works here find him playing with repetition and silk screening, printing up ghostly, painterly, effervescent monochrome images of stacks of soft drinks, neon lit crosswalks and peep show adverts. This is the grim, gritty side of Japanese urbanity, but you can see American capitalism creeping in and taking hold, slowly suffocating the streets.
He repeats an image of lips like Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, duplicates a photo of people walking down a street, their bodies becoming indistinguishable from the adverts hanging from the high rises around them. Then he snaps a woman lifting her skirt, another stomping down the road in thigh-high boots. It’s like Warhol without the pretence, and with added filth. Hamiltons Gallery, London, until 30 October
View image in fullscreen Unsettling, dystopian film … Enclosure by Jenkin van Zyl. Photograph: Jenkin van Zyl Jenkin van Zyl is hellbent on cementing their place as English art’s ultimate hyper-camp weirdo, and their new show at Somerset House Studios is a pretty persuasive argument.
The exhibition is centred on a speculative sci-fi movie about some bleak company where tourists can inhabit other people’s bodies. But when the central character, a starlet called Mercy, comes to end the lease on her body, the line between reality and fiction starts getting anxiously blurry. Who is the real Mercy, and who is the clone? Who controls your identity? Who has access to what makes you you ?
Its grubby atmosphere is reinforced by an immersive installation that replicates the film set as you walk in, with broken automatons, flickering lights and piles of rubbish, all bathed in a pink glow. It’s an unsettling, uncomfortable, dirty, dystopian bit of art cinema – like an overblown, fetishistic take on Terry Gilliam’s Brazil . Van Zyl has a singular aesthetic, and this is pretty much as watchable as this kind of art film gets. It stays with you long after you’ve escaped its unnerving clutches.
The gallery handout wants to make out like this is about technological advancement and ideas of authorship. But like all good sci-fi, this feels more obviously allegorical than that. It’s about identity, the versions of ourselves that we present and preserve online, or in public, and how easy it is to lose your grip on the true you. Like a lot of artists these days who grew up with the internet and reality TV turning their brain into gloop, Van Zyl i…