Eddie Kang is obsessed with manga. An avid collector of the Japanese comics since he was a child, his creative world is dramatically influenced by animation and cartoons. But if you think that Kang is an otaku, a devotee of the geeky Japanese subculture of mostly men obsessed with anime, comic books and other forms of escapism, then think again.
With stylish hair, designer clothes and fluent English that betrays his eight years spent in the US - including four at the Rhode Island School of Design where he studied video, film and animation - the 27 year-old South Korean artist looks like he just walked off the set of a soap opera.
Kang is one of a new kind of Asian artist: computer savvy, working in pixels rather than pigment and using easy-to-understand visuals. He is one of 40 artists included in the animamix exhibit at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. "The most important thing I want to put in my work is storytelling," he said to the Taipei Times.
"Everyone has a desire to appreciate art, or visual language, but I think it's a matter of the form," he said. "If it's a form that people can easily understand, without reading a script, without reading my pre-sketched work, I think it's a form that communicates best with people."
Kang's ideas about art stand in stark contrast to the abstract styles in vogue during the 20th century, which produced works that left many confused over the meaning of a painting or sculpture.
That confusion was shared by many young Asian artists who were brought up on a diet of Japanese manga and anime. Their work has itself become an art movement called animamix.
Art critic and Shih Chien University professor Victoria Lu (陸蓉之) first coined the term animamix for a 2004 exhibit that she curated called Fiction.Love: Ultra New Visions in Contemporary Art at Taipei's Museum of Contemporary Art. She has since curated exhibits in Shanghai, Beijing and Singapore.
Lu says animamix art has four discernible characteristics: the worship of youth culture, images and objects that are rich in meaning, a new perspective on light influenced by computer technology and blurred distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow art into non-hierarchical art forms.
The last is particularly important because producing installations, paintings and sculptures that can be sold in the highbrow market are crucial to an artist's success.
"Fine artists can turn themselves into commercial artists if they want to," Kang said. "But [for] commercial artists it's really hard to develop their work into fine art. Andy Warhol is the exception to this rule."
Like Warhol, animamix artists take iconic images from popular culture, repackage them and sell them to the highest bidder. Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara are two examples. Murakami, with about 100 employees, recently sold a sculpture titled Mr Pointy to Christie's owner Francois Pinault for a reputed US$1.5 million, a testament to the growing popularity of his work on the international art market.
Unlike Warhol, however, animamix artists frequently mass-produce their works and market them as videos, mouse pads and more. Murakami has a whole line of plastic figurines that sell for about US$3. At the opening of the exhibition at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, South Korean artist Kwon Ki Soo was handing out rubber key chains and cell phone caddies of a character from his paintings.
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