MFA's Japanese exhibit shows dialogue between West and East
Kyle Chayka
Issue date: 9/10/07 Section: Arts
There is a game of tug of war going on in Japan today. The country that once stood in perfect isolation is now the center of a flowering of visual arts that takes as much from western pop and commodity art as it does from traditional Zen aesthetics and the innate Japanese sense of calligraphy and draftsmanship.
"Contemporary Outlook: Japan," at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston collects a representative sample of these synthesizers, purporting not to be comprehensive, but to give the viewer an inside look at current day Japanese art. It succeeds admirably, particularly for such a small show.
One cannot speak of contemporary Japanese art without first mentioning Takashi Murakami and Superflat. Building upon pop art's "flattening" and merging of high culture and low culture, Superflat seeks to combine every branch of Japanese visual output into one layer - a single uniting horizon that links industrial design to Japanese comic-drawing (manga) to public sculpture to mural painting to avant-garde easel painting.
Takashi Murakami may only be represented in this exhibit by one painting, but he stands as an influence to every present-day artist in the room. His artistic "factory," that produces everything from T-shirts to paintings, has trained contemporary Japanese artists as a kind of Renaissance workshop.
The factory, named Kaikai Kiki, apprentices artists to do their own work and also assist in the making of Murakami's. Murakami's glossy painting style is highly reminiscent of Japanese anime with its flat, solid colors and boundless energy. Here, however, he turns the style inside out, employing it in a nightmarish, inverted mess of eyes, bodies and gaping maws of teeth.
Chiho Aoshima, at this moment also being presented at the Boston ICA, bears the unmistakable influence of Murakami's work. Hers is closer to anime's narrative qualities, preserving both its story-telling capacity and its idealized mode of figuration. Here she shows a piece called "Golden Fish," (1999) the story of a wide-eyed, red haired girl whose boyfriend asks her to stir fry her goldfish, only to have the spirit of the goldfish splash oil into her eye, making it fall out. Fortunately, the story ends with a good spirited "Let's go to an eye doctor!" and suddenly in this world that is both slick and violently surreal, everything is okay again.
"Contemporary Outlook: Japan," at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston collects a representative sample of these synthesizers, purporting not to be comprehensive, but to give the viewer an inside look at current day Japanese art. It succeeds admirably, particularly for such a small show.
One cannot speak of contemporary Japanese art without first mentioning Takashi Murakami and Superflat. Building upon pop art's "flattening" and merging of high culture and low culture, Superflat seeks to combine every branch of Japanese visual output into one layer - a single uniting horizon that links industrial design to Japanese comic-drawing (manga) to public sculpture to mural painting to avant-garde easel painting.
Takashi Murakami may only be represented in this exhibit by one painting, but he stands as an influence to every present-day artist in the room. His artistic "factory," that produces everything from T-shirts to paintings, has trained contemporary Japanese artists as a kind of Renaissance workshop.
The factory, named Kaikai Kiki, apprentices artists to do their own work and also assist in the making of Murakami's. Murakami's glossy painting style is highly reminiscent of Japanese anime with its flat, solid colors and boundless energy. Here, however, he turns the style inside out, employing it in a nightmarish, inverted mess of eyes, bodies and gaping maws of teeth.
Chiho Aoshima, at this moment also being presented at the Boston ICA, bears the unmistakable influence of Murakami's work. Hers is closer to anime's narrative qualities, preserving both its story-telling capacity and its idealized mode of figuration. Here she shows a piece called "Golden Fish," (1999) the story of a wide-eyed, red haired girl whose boyfriend asks her to stir fry her goldfish, only to have the spirit of the goldfish splash oil into her eye, making it fall out. Fortunately, the story ends with a good spirited "Let's go to an eye doctor!" and suddenly in this world that is both slick and violently surreal, everything is okay again.
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