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Sixteen Japanese artists consented to gather under the catchy

banner “Bye Bye Kitty!!!” to combat the prevailing cult of kawaii, “cute,” in the spring 2011 exhibition at Japan Society, New York (fig. 1). The epony-mous catalogue Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art by David Elliott, with a contribution by Tetsuya Ozaki, and published by the Japan Society and Yale University Press, is available in softcover for $35 at shop.japansociety.org.

According to the guest curator, David Elliott, the former director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum and now an independent curator based in Berlin, the premise of the show emerged in reaction to Takashi Murakami’s “Little Boy” exhibition held at Japan Society six years ago.1 In the catalogue to “Little Boy,” Murakami offers his version of a psychoanalytic theory of Japanese society and culture after World War II, claiming that Japan was emasculated by the atomic bombs and the United States and that his generation or younger Japanese have resorted to all things cute in order to escape the realities of life. Elliott judges that “Murakami has apparently decided to fight the disease with the language of its infection in a homeo-pathic treatment for Japanese art” (p. 7).

To make his point, Elliott selected artists who “have produced work that indicates a more complicated, adult view of life, melding traditional viewpoints with perceptions of present and future in radical and sometimes unsettling combinations” (p. 7). With the provocative subtitle “Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art,” Elliott refers to the struggle between extremes of fantasy and nightmare, ideal and real. While the exhibition claims to be radical, its narrow scope re-stereotypes Japanese art as neo-traditional and overlooks the healthy multiplicity and increasing diversification among internationally versed artists who no longer fit comfortably within a conventional frame of Japanese art.

Although the sixteen featured artists were heralded by the Japan Society press release as “new wave,” about a third of them are mid-career artists who have worked contemporaneously with Takashi Murakami, now age fifty, and have more or less established reputations in Japan and overseas.2 American reviews amplified this misinformation, lumping all of the artists as “Japan’s new breed” or merely a “new generation.”3 Contrary to their assumptions, paintings by Makoto Aida (b. 1965), Yamaguchi Akira (b. 1969; he uses the Japanese order for his name) and Hisashi Tenmyouya

“Bye Bye Kitty!!!”

Midori Yoshimoto

Fig. 1. Catalogue cover

EXHIBITION REVIEW

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(b. 1966) were introduced to American audiences during the controversial “American Effect” exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2003. Aida held a solo exhibition at the Andrew Roth Gallery in New York in 2006, and showed sculptures and photographic work in “Heavy Light” at the International Center of Photography in New York in 2008.4 Another participant in “Bye Bye Kitty!!!,” the photographer Miwa Yanagi (b. 1967), who was in the same ICP exhibition as Aida, was also part of the 2006 international survey of feminist art, “Global Feminisms,” at the Brooklyn Museum, had a solo exhibition at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York in 2007, then represented Japan at the 2009 Venice Biennale.

The artists of the younger generation of “Bye Bye Kitty!!!”—including Manabu Ikeda (b. 1973), Tomoko Kashiki (b. 1982), Rinko Kawauchi (b. 1972), Haruka Kojin (b. 1983), Kumi Machida (b. 1970), Kohei Nawa (b. 1975), Motohiko Odani (b. 1972) and Tomoko Shioyasu (b. 1981)—more clearly benefited from a major group-exhibition opportunity in New York. London-based Tomoko Yoneda (b. 1965) and Hiraki Sawa (b. 1977) and Berlin-based Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972), on the other hand, have actively participated in the global circuit of contemporary art. Their inclusion in the exhibition begs the question of a nationality-bound approach.

UNPRECEDENTED PRESS ATTENTION

These few issues aside, the exhibition and catalogue have done an excel-lent job of presenting previously lesser-known Japanese artists to an American audience. Because it opened just one week after the catastrophic

earthquake in Japan on March 11, when Japan Society became one of the first American institutions to raise funds for the relief effort, the exhibition drew unprecedented attention from the press. It was inevitable that most journalists’ reception of the show became colored through the lens of the multiple disasters. Holland Cotter of The New York Times saw a mood of anxiety pervading the work in the exhibition, continuing, “No one, of course, could have known that the show’s images of material fragility and decay would end up being seen in the light of real-life disaster.”5

The Washington Post found a deeper portent in the aftermath of natural disasters and ensuing unsteadiness as the world follows updates from the Fukushima nuclear plant. The review concluded that the exhibition’s rejec-tion of Japan’s obsession with Pikachu and giggly Lolitas “seems almost inconsequential now.”6 It is true that those disasters have already impacted Japanese society on a fundamental level, and its art may never be the same. In a totally unexpected manner, the superficially cheerful and cute may give way to an era of socially committed artists, now that many are participating in relief efforts. Still, David Elliott seems prescient when he writes that the “anxieties about the force and control of nature are matched within the Japanese imagination by feelings of frustration, impotence, and foreboding. In a densely urbanized, highly stratified society situated in the heart of an earthquake zone, the fear that the worst could easily happen lies at the back of many minds” (p. 33).

No work in the exhibition fits a dark mood more than Aida’s magnum opus, his mural-size painting of ten by twenty-three feet, Ash Color Mountains (fig. 2). Seen from ten or more feet away, it appears to be a traditional landscape of elegantly sloped mountains in Yamato-e style. Closer, those mountains are comprised of stacks of corpses of businessmen buried with office detritus, such as computers, desks and plastic plants. They immediately remind Japanese viewers of the so-called Dream Island, the euphemistic nickname for an island in Tokyo Bay made of waste landfill, and where a radioactive ship was moored in the late fifties. Aida began the painting in Beijing in 2009, but could not complete it in time for his 2010 solo show there, and was finally able to do so for this New York exhibition. When touring the exhibition with the gallery director, Joe Earle, weeks in advance of the exhibition, the artist told us he had added some surprises for the viewer, such as Pixar’s Wall-E character and Waldo of the popular children’s illustrated book, Where’s Waldo? series. They are hard to find—almost inside jokes. Although the curator and American journalists have assumed the men of Ash Color Mountains to be Japanese “salarymen,” a close examination yields details such as blond hair and various skin colors suggesting an issue broader than Japan.

Ash Color Mountains required of Aida the largest number of drawings “ever done in his life,” and is a companion piece to Aida’s controversial painting Juicer Mixer (2001), not included in the show, which depicts numerous naked female bodies being mixed in a gigantic blender––an homage to the monumental 1943 painting of entwined Japanese and American dead soldiers Final Fighting on Attu by Tsuguharu Fujita (Léonard Foujita).7 Ash Color Mountains can be seen as a contemporary version of a war painting,

Fig. 2. Makoto Aida. Ash Color

Mountains. 2009–10. Acrylic on canvas.

300 × 700 cm. Taguchi Art Collection.

Photo: Kei Miyajima, courtesy Mizuma

Art Gallery. Copyright © Makoto Aida

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commenting on the recent worldwide financial crisis that was triggered by corporate greed in the United States.

Miwa Yanagi’s celebrated series of photographs, My Grandmothers, coun-tered Aida’s massive painting from the opposite wall of the same room with an intimacy and immediacy (fig. 3). The deliberate juxtaposition of Aida, the “big boy” star of the all-men Showa 40-nen Kai (Group 1965), with the “big girl,” Yanagi, known for her piquant feminist approach, is a credit to the curator.8 To match the enormity of Aida’s work in a true sense, however, Yanagi’s Windswept Women, a series of oversized, imagined portraits of ageless, shamanic women, shown at the 2009 Venice Biennale, would have been a better match. Perhaps they are too large to fit in the relatively modest size of the gallery.

My Grandmothers, begun around 2002, had already been shown in the United States on several occasions. Yanagi interviewed, then dressed and made-up young women as older versions of themselves placed in a theatrical tableau, a “future fantasy of old age” (p. 15). In My Grandmothers/HYONHEE, a Korean woman being fussed over by assistants reveals her status and pride as the owner/president of a TV station.

In her exquisite paintings in the second room of the exhibition, Tomoko Kashiki presented a series of female figures on the verge of falling or disappearing (fig. 4). Their unnaturally elongated limbs reveal a lineage

of Japanese beauty painting (bijinga) by such modern artists as Kaburaki Kiyokata (1878–1913) and Takehisa Yumeji (1884–1934). Kashiki’s melding of a body into the background recalls the work of American Surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning.

Holland Cotter found Kashiki’s women––“both insubstantial and en-dangered”––as part of a feminist tendency in new art, noting that half of the sixteen artists in the show are women.9 In his lecture at Japan Society, curator David Elliott remarked that the gender ratio happened to be fifty-fifty, and that his selection was based purely on the quality of the works.10 If he had meant to give a false impression of the Japanese art world as having achieved a gender equality, it would have been problematic, as well as inaccurate.

REINVENTIONS OF NIHONGA

Painting dominated the exhibition throughout the first two galleries. The works of Yamaguchi Akira (b. 1969), Hisashi Tenmyouya (b. 1966) and Manabu Ikeda (b. 1973)—all stars of Tokyo’s Mizuma Gallery—impress the viewer with impossibly intricate details, and are drawn in their own contemporary reinventions of Nihonga, modern Japanese painting in a traditional mode. None of them studied Nihonga, and they use oil and

Fig. 3. Miwa Yanagi. My Grandmothers/

HYONEE. 2007. C-print, Plexiglass. 130

× 100 cm. Private collection, New York.

Photo courtesy of the artist and Yoshiko

Isshiki Office. Copyright © Miwa Yanagi

Fig. 4. Tomoko Kashiki. Roof Garden.

2008. Acrylic, pencil and paper on cot-

ton, mounted on wood panel. 225 × 183

cm. Dai-ichi Mutual Life Insurance

Company

Fig. . Manabu Ikeda. History of Rise and

Fall. 2006. Pen and acrylic ink on paper,

mounted on board. 200 × 200 cm. Taka-

hashi Collection. Photo: Kei Miyajima,

courtesy Mizuma Art Gallery, Copyright

© Manabu Ikeda

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acrylics, but they employ traditional formats of Japanese painting, such as the scroll (Yamaguchi) or folding screen (Tenmyouya) and often present hybrids of contemporary and historical subjects. Ikeda, who spends about a year on the execution of each of his paintings, depicts numerous Lilliputian samurais and ninjas—moving about within precariously stacked layers of castlelike buildings (fig. 5). His meandering railways and locomotive trains are reminiscent of the anime series Galaxy Train 999. Japan Society offered magnifying glasses for viewers who wished to decipher these details and wanted to make their own sense out of this sci-fi, fairy-tale narrative.

At the turn into the third gallery, an inset rectangle opposite the interior garden, the atmosphere changed drastically with Dialogue with Absence by Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972) (fig. 6), a chilling installation of a white wedding dress, connected to pumps that squirt a red, bloodlike liquid through surgical tubing. At the 2001 Yokohama Triennale, Shiota had presented five giant, mud-drenched dresses hung from the ceiling, being washed-down by a shower at the top. In Dialogue, the white dress takes on a sort of human life. The video monitor on an adjacent wall showed an unclothed Shiota lying on the floor, breathing with surgical tubes surrounding her, which one may see as a comment on the fragility of human existence in the contrast between the absent physical body in the room and the virtual presence on the screen. Reminiscent of Frida Kahlo’s Two Fridas (1939), in

Fig. . Chiharu Shiota. Dialogue with

Absence. 2010. Painted wedding dress,

peristaltic pumps, transparent plastic

tubing, dyed water. Courtesy Galerie

Christophe Gaillard / Haunch of Venison

Fig. a. Kohei Nawa, in installation

view of the exhibition, his PixCell Deer

#24 (2011) in the foreground; Motohiko

Odani’s SP Extra: Malformed Noh-

Mask Series Half Skeleton’s Twins: Tosaka

(2008); and Tomoko Shioyasu’s Vortex

(2011) in the background. Courtesy Japan

Society

which the double portraits of the artist are linked by a blood vein, Shiota’s work literally creates a dialogue between the dress, the human surrogate and the virtual body in video. Although some viewers may at first find the reference derivative, Shiota’s installation partly stems from her recent treatment for cancer.

The eeriness in Shiota’s work is intensified with the deformed Noh masks of Motohiko Odani (b. 1972) and the stuffed deer studded with glass balls of Kohei Nawa (b. 1975), spectacularly lit in the center of the next room (fig. 7a,b). Both works allude to a perversion or destruction of nature using quintessential symbols of Japanese culture, the theater mask and sacred Shinto deer, here encased in a skin of differently sized clear glass jewels. It is hard not to be reminded of Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde animals, but Nawa’s point is the ever-changing membrane and the fragility of existence rather than shock value. Although their deformity is alarming, there was also a breathtaking beauty in this fourth gallery, realized with Tomoko Shioyasu’s (b. 1981) floor-to-ceiling Vortex, a thin plasticized paper scrim made of intricate cut-outs––a traditional art technique––lit to create mes-merizing shadow whirls on the wall and floor. Approximately fifty small, color photographs by Rinko Kawauchi (b. 1972) that are lyrical observations of life and death in everyday vignettes offered a quiet, contemplative space, regrettably dominated by the adjacent screen and patterns.

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OMINOUS ENERGY THROUGHOUT

It was difficult to understand why some of the work in the last two rooms of the exhibition were selected. Photographs by Tomoko Yoneda (b. 1965) of Kimsa, the former National Military Defense Security Command building in South Korea, are exquisite in details and lighting, but viewers were pressed to find an answer on their own as to how this non-Japanese subject fit into the context of subversion of the cute in “Bye Bye Kitty!!!.” Three enormous paintings by Kumi Machida (b. 1970), the only artist in this exhibition who formally studied Nihonga, not only held up the space well with their dynamic compositions and lines, but also radiated the unsettling energy that permeated the majority of the exhibition (fig. 8). Although her androgynous, robot-like child appears to be obedient to his/her mother, the mechanical helmet might be the actual brain of the child. It is a new, much-welcomed development that artists

with Nihonga backgrounds are challenging the long-segregated divisions within the Japanese art world with their own very personal approaches, striking a major difference from the commercial route taken by their forerunner, Takashi Murakami. She wants to sell her paintings, too, but Murakami’s art exploits otaku culture, whereas Machida’s subject derives from her personal experience and feelings.

The two videos by Hiraki Sawa, shown in the final darkened room, hardly subverted the cute as they depicted dreamy worlds of a doll house and a kitchen where anthropomorphized utensils were walking around. Nara Yoshitomo’s (b. 1959) photograph of Hello Kitty tombstones for deceased pets, hung at the end of the exhibition, seemed too frivolous to serve as an epilogue to the entire show.

Unfortunately, the exhibition catalogue does not include biographical information on the artists. Slightly reminiscent of Murakami’s Little Boy catalogue, the sociological perspective predominates in Elliott’s essay “Bye Bye Kitty . . .” and Tetsuya Ozaki’s overarching summary of the Heisei period (1989 to the present). If they had allowed the artists to speak for themselves, we would have more information about their artistic inspira-tions, processes and visions for the future. However, the exhibition still served as an excellent entrée to today’s Japanese art and brought together some outstanding works—the majority of which have rarely been shown outside of Japan. “Bye Bye Kitty!!!” was definitely a step forward in the break from kawaii art.

Fig. 8. Kumi Machida. Relation. 2006.

Blue and brown ink, mineral pigments

and other pigments on kumohada linen

paper. 181.5 × 343 cm. Courtesy BIGI

Co., Ltd.

Notes

1. For a more critical interpretation of “Little

Boy,” see Midori Yoshimoto, “Little Boy: The

Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture at the

Japan Society,” Art Asia Pacific 46 (Fall 2005).

2. This point is shared with Adrian Favell in

his review of the same exhibition in the April

2011 issue of Art in America (available online at

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/fea-

tures/bye-bye-kitty/).

3. Jill Conner, “Japan’s New Breed: Bye Bye

Kitty,” Art in America (March 2011); and Kevin

Conley, “Dark Depictions of Japan at Bye Bye

Kitty!!! Exhibit in New York,” The Washington

Post (March 23, 2011).

4. For example, Aida’s 2006 multi-screen

painting A Picture of an Air Raid on New York

City (War Picture Returns) was on view at the

Whitney’s “American Effect” show from July

3 to October 12, 2003. The exhibition “Heavy

Light: Recent Photography and Video from

Japan,” curated by Christopher Phillips and

Noriko Fuku, was held at ICP from May 16 to

September 7, 2008. See http://www.icp.org/mu-

seum/exhibitions/heavy-light for more details.

5. Holland Cotter, “Anxiety on the Fault Line,”

The New York Times (March 17, 2011).

6. Conley, “Dark Depictions of Japan.”

7. Makoto Aida, quoted in Mizuma Gallery’s

press release for his solo exhibition “Ebaka”

in 2010 (available at http://mizuma-art.co.jp/

exhibition/1269584444.php).

8. For the exhibition “The Group 1965 (Showa

40-Nen Kai) ‘We are Boys!’” at Kunsthalle

Düsseldorf from May 21 to July 3, 2011, see the

review by Adrian Favell on Art It (http://www.

art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/Nkzn2v6rRlWAZLImc-

qHT/).

9. Cotter, “Anxiety on the Fault Line.”

10. David Elliott, lecture at Japan Society, New

York, March 22, 2011.

Fig. 7b. Motohiko Odani. SP Extra:

Malformed Noh-Mask Series Half

Skeleton’s Twins: Tosaka. 2008. Wood,

natural mineral pigment, lacquer and

other media. 21.5 × 19.5 × 7 cm. Courtesy

Yamamoto Gendai

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