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Indepth Arts News:
"Supreflat Openes at the Walker"
2001-07-15 until 2001-10-14
Walker Art Center
Minneapolis, MN,
USA
Organized by Tokyo-based artist Takashi Murakami, the exhibition
Superflat investigates a tendency toward two-dimensionality in
Japanese visual art, animation, graphic design, and fashion. Tracing
this flatness back to pioneers of Japanese painting in the 17th,
18th, and 19th centuries, Murakami has developed a theory of
super-flat Japanese art in which this legacy can be seen to be
resurrected in the post-World War II rise of the Japanese cartoon
cultures of manga (comic books) and anime (animation).
In his
essay A Theory of Super Flat Japanese Art (2000), Murakami
suggests a direct line of historical descent between the flatness of
the prints of the 19th-century master Katsushika Hokusai, for
example, and the 1970s television animation of Yoshinori Kanada.
Both share a uniquely Japanese sense of superflatness, which
because it is decidedly unlike our normal reality, Murakami argues,
can create an escape from the pressures and expectations of
everyday life.
Superflat presents works by
19 of the most exciting artists
working in Japan today in
painting, photography, works
on paper, video, fashion,
computer animation, cartoons,
performance, and sculpture.
While all of these artists lend
support to Murakami's
argument about
two-dimensionality, each also
explores and exceeds the
limits of their respective
genres. For example, Koji
Morimoto, best known for
designing the opening credits
for MTV Japan, makes
sketches and animations that
take their inspiration from
17th-century Japanese scrolls and statues. Likewise, the styled photographs
of Masafumi Sanai and Chikashi Suzuki deal with prevalent cultural
subjects while imitating the look of fashion and commercial photography.
Fashion itself plays a significant part in
Japanese culture, and many artists are
working within the everyday reality of
ready-to-wear clothing. A performance group
as well as a clothing line, 20471120 stages
elaborate large-scale fashion shows that
invite audience participation. The brand's
mantra is fashion, art, and character. The
graphic design firm groovisions, on the other
hand, has created a persona called Chappie
that appears many places, often multiple
times in the same instance, wearing different
outfits. The Chappie boys and girls are
distinguishable only by the clothing they
wear, making a poignant statement about the
place of fashion in our lives. Cute,
cartoonlike images, known in Japanese as
kawaii, are a predominant part of
contemporary commercial culture. In
Yoshitomo Nara's cartoonishly aggressive
punk children, Chiho Aoshima's digitally rendered girls, or Kentaro
Takekuma's familiar cartoon image of Thomas the Tank Engine (a project
that aims to deter suicidal commuters from jumping in front of trains),
Japan's consumer culture of cuteness is analyzed and dismantled through a
variety of provocative strategies. In Murakami's argument, all of this work
can be traced back visually through the techniques of anime to a wide
range of premodern Japanese master painters. It is this legacy of the
superflat that lives on today in the cultural DNA of contemporary Japanese
art and visual culture at large.
IMAGE:
Groovision
Chappie 33
2001
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