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.
Aya Takano is an interesting counterpoint to the stylish flatness of Aoshima and Murakami. Again, her work references the anime style, but instead breaks open the TV-screen surface of other artists with more painterly media like watercolor. Her teenage girl figures have brushstroke outlines and wavering limbs, painted on the likes of receipts and scrap paper.
All of these young impresarios lack a certain quality that is more than made up for by the older artists included in the show. One section is devoted primarily to a series of photos of Japan in the 1970s, when Western culture and ideas were instigating tremendous change in the country.
Katsumi Watanabe documents the changing style of the day in the series "Gangs of Kabukicho," named for the red-light district where groups of young people in loose suits and flapper dresses were the authority of the night.
Yayoi Kusama, born 1929, has worked in a much more minimalist vein than her Superflat successors, painting canvases of colored dots that are inspired by hallucinations she suffered as a child. Never has the term color-field painting been truer than with her oscillating networks of varying sized spots. Though it may seem stylistically different, Kusama's work bears an interesting link to Murakami's Superflat, due to her expression of infinite space, extending interminably, endlessly chaotic; a representation of the insufferable and incomprehensible complexities of life.
No matter what your opinion may be of Japanese popular culture, "Contemporary Outlook: Japan" is a powerful show. It assaults the senses with color and vivid life, stretched, distorted and violent though it may be.
Metrically opposed forces of high art and low culture are marshaled and contained. Perhaps most emblematic of the artists' commercial concerns is Murakami's "Monogram Cherry Blossom," a Louis Vuitton bag emblazoned with manically smiling flowers. It meshes the epitome of a high-status consumer item with Murakami's own brand of luxury object: his art and design.
One sculpture stands on the floor of the MFA basement. It is a brightly colored yellow elephant with fish for eyes wearing blue shorts. Behind it is a pile of dung, painted in blaring pinks and greens. Maybe this is the real metaphor. The art in "Contemporary Outlook: Japan" is a shock, a glazing and recasting of commercialism, a post-modern outgrowth of the utterly image-mad capitalism that has made Japan what it is today. The show runs through Feb. 10, 2008.
