The Scottish artist Jack McLean, who has lived and worked in Japan for more than 30 years, has developed a distinctive body of work whose imagery is inspired by biker culture, rock’n’roll attitude, and the enduring, mythical allure of the open road. Rebellion! Throw in some skeletons in leather jackets and the super-dry, offbeat humor of a freaky-funny performance artist and, as McLean’s new exhibition at JPS Gallery in Tokyo shows, he manages to conjure up an all-new subculture of his own.

In this journal-like report, Steven Hirsch looks back at his recent discovery of the strange, burned-wood pictures made by the self-taught artist Tancred Calhoun and offers some observations about the purposes they might have served for the relatively isolated man who created them.

During his lifetime, few people knew that Tancred Calhoun (1947-2020), a U.S. Army veteran who had served in the Vietnam War, created unusual artworks made by burning images into wooden boards. Calhoun’s pictures exude sexual energy. They’re peculiar — and oddly compelling. brutjournal contributing photographer and painter Steven Hirsch recently discovered Calhoun’s works and did some serious sleuthing to learn about the life of the self-taught artist who produced them. See our art-filled report about this noteworthy, new find in the outsider art field.

Since 2013, the artist Naoto Nakagawa has produced two large groups of paintings — his “Earth Series” and his “Mona Lisa Series” — whose wide-ranging subject matter and complex compositions refer to the history of humanity’s intellectual and cultural achievements. These technically, thematically ambitious series exude a sincere, humanistic air. In them, Nakagawa expresses a sense of wonder in the face of the power of the human mind. Now, the symbolism in his art has taken, as he says, a local turn. He’s still thinking philosophically on a broad scale, but the imagery of his newest paintings, which are now on view at Kapow Gallery in downtown Manhattan, more explicitly refers to the city he has called home for more than six decades.

The exhibition “ALFREDO JAAR: YOU AND ME AND THE OTHERS,” at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, offers what the Chilean-born contemporary artist Jaar, a deep, provocative thinker, calls “an anthology” of his works in various genres and media dating back to the early 1970s. Jaar’s work is inherently political but never in a partisan way. It’s never polemical. Instead, his art, from small, image-based pieces to large, spectacular installations, explores the fundamental meaning, function, and impact of that which is political and, by extension, of that which is just or unjust. See Edward M. Gómez’s photo-filled report.