In today’s world of contemporary art, style is the mark of greatness. At least this is the impression that could be gleaned from Japanese art and its mimickers. But what of substance? Where’s the connection to the human condition in all its multiplicity?
These are just some of the questions begged by the 10 works of art by three of Japan’s preeminent artists, currently on display at the Metaphysical Art Gallery.
Takashi Murakami’s iconic acrylic on canvas Eye Love Superflat celebrates the Louis Vuitton brand — a company the artist has collaborated with — and Murakami’s own “superflat” sensibility.
Discussion of Murakami’s oeuvre is usually prefaced with his own success as a brand. But that’s style, that’s Warhol, that’s America — where Murakami’s art is popular. Showing only one work from Murakami’s vast output is misleading because there is so much more to his paintings, drawings, sculpture and installation, and looking at the one canvas on the wall — though gaining the attention of the gallery viewers — is a tease.
Murakami’s canvas, however, is the exception in an exhibition that provides a brief glimpse of the artists’ styles and preoccupations.
Contemporary Asian art is often preoccupied with cuteness (可愛). Rather than a term denoting the adorableness of a stuffed animal, it has become a moniker used to describe Asian pop culture separated from other ideas of art by both time and stylistic innovation. With the artists in this show, the visual language takes inspiration from manga (comics) and anime and celebrates youth culture and the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, both in the US and Japan.
The four works by Yoshitomo Nara, 49, introduce the artist’s approach and are fairly representative of his style.
Each of the four canvases features a “cute” child with a simple background. The bemused gazes and knowing air of the children belies the fact that Nara’s subjects are fully conscious of what the world has in store for them. Nara’s work invites us to move beyond the conformity that comes with adulthood and return to the optimism and rebelliousness of childhood, while at the same time recognizing that children are soon thrust into a world largely beyond their control.
While the children found in Nara’s works are self-knowing, Yayoi Kusama’s work digs deep into, or perhaps confronts and reveals, her own pathology.
Kusama, 80, says that she has suffered from hallucinations since her early youth, which included seeing spots and hearing the voices. Instead of fighting the sensory illusions, she painted and drew them. As a result, her characteristic imagery of dots and webs, monochrome pigment and repetitive forms are incorporated in her sculpture and painting and betrays an obsessive mind at work.
Her way of seeing discom-bobulates the viewer and is reminiscent of the psychedelic 1960s and 1970s (when she was a resident of New York) and the cultural movements she experienced during those formative decades. Kusama’s work is fascinating because she’s turned her childhood visions into an art that replicates the obsessive nature of the mind and art itself.
Although somewhat disappointing in size, especially the single Murakami canvas, the works in this exhibit provide a key to Japanese contemporary art and the mythology of the pop culture that it reflects. Whether the exhibit contains substance (or does the artists justice) is left up to the viewer to decide.
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