Bye Bye Little Boy

By Adrian Favell 4/1/11

View Slideshow Miwa Yanagi: Geisha (Akiyo/Mai/Hitomi/Noriko), 2002, from the series “My Grandmothers,” C-print, Plexiglas, text panel, 70 7/8 by 94 1/2 inches. Courtesy of the artist, and Yoshiko Isshiki Office, Tokyo.; Makoto Aida: Ash Color Mountains, 2009-10, acrylic on canvas, 9 7/8 by 23 feet. Taguchi Art Collection. Courtesy Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo.;

New York It is just six years since the Japan Society in New York put on Takashi Murakami’s “Little Boy” exhibition, a stylish sampling and remix of Japanese contemporary art produced since the early 1990s. Acting as curator and star of his own show, Japan’s best-known contemporary artist put pedophilic images on pristine white walls and plastic elephants and dung in Central Park. The catalogue he edited is a DIY sociology of postwar Japan as reflected by comic strips and the culture of sci-fi obsessed otaku (nerds). The Japan Society had a smash hit on its hands, riding a wave of neo-Japonisme that for a while made manga, anime and J-pop the hippest things in town. No one stopped to wonder if Murakami’s selection was representative and good enough, or indeed if his clever packaging of Japan wasn’t really all just © MURAKAMI, as his later world-touring solo retrospective was called.

“Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art” is an ambitious new survey on view at the Japan Society, one seeking to re-evoke, then overturn, some of the assumptions established by “Little Boy.” The Sanrio corporation’s iconic cat, Hello Kitty, here takes the fall for endless cute cartoon characters and bizarre sexual mores that now elicit fatigue. The lukewarm reception of the recent retrospective at New York’s Asia Society by Murakami’s only real Japanese peer in global celebrity, Yoshitomo Nara, further points toward the expiry of kawaii(cute) and kuru (cool) Japan.

David Elliott, the independent curator of “Bye Bye Kitty,” suggests in the show’s catalogue that Murakami’s ironic attitude toward the trashy and risqué was meant to be a homeopathy for the country’s passive-aggressive postwar psyche, dominated by U.S. popular culture as much as by its military power. But whatever the critique smuggled in, it was the blatant Warhol- and Koons-derived commercialism that everyone remembers. While recognizing similar sources, “Bye Bye Kitty” takes a different tack, offering a more critical, socially diverse and politically engaged look at recent Japanese art. An unspoken motive behind the show seems to be the desperate wish to steal back some attention for Japan—global notice that has long since moved on to China, Korea, India and other, hotter, Asian locales.

The Japan Society could not have done better than placing this task in Elliott’s hands. Not only is he an acknowledged scholar of postwar avant-garde Japanese art, but he was also once an important player in Tokyo art circles. Back in the early 2000s, Japanese contemporary art seemed on the cusp of a major international advance. Elliott was headhunted to become the first-ever Westerner to hold a major curatorial position in the country: director of the new Mori Art Museum, atop the spectacular Roppongi Hills commercial and residential complex. The year he arrived, 2001, saw the successful launch of the Yokohama Triennale, and the massive triumphant homecoming exhibitions of Nara and Murakami after their breakthroughs abroad.

The Japanese media dubbed 2001 “The Year of Narakami,” but in the shadow of their fame the local art scene was buzzing too. A brace of artists propelled by the same 1990s Tokyo cultural explosion were hitting their creative peaks, new galleries were opening, and there was a sizeable upsurge in the sales and critical recognition of Japanese art worldwide. Elliott was on hand to soak it all up, translating what he found into a series of important shows at the new museum, which opened in late 2003. He was a key part of the social scene, too, which took shape in the shadow of Roppongi during raucous openings and late-night drinking parties at a scruffy warehouse gallery owned by Sueo Mizuma, a dynamic collector and dealer with a taste for provocative art that employs traditionalist styles, and at journalist Chie Sumiyoshi’s legendary Traumaris bar in the similarly rough-hewn Complex gallery building. What Elliott saw and heard while hanging out made for a rather more powerful brew than the fizzy soda served up by Murakami. It concerned art drenched in a much more caustic and adult popular culture, alert to social and political disappointments. This work grew out of a bitter, local, “Asian” (i.e., anti-Western) and bloody-minded discourse. And, as Murakami’s star rose in the West, the talk in Tokyo was resentful. Elliott’s curatorial choices were essentially born here, in this very specific local environment.

The sense of needing to show Japanese contemporary art as it is, not as it has been selectively represented in the West, runs through Elliot’s exhibition (which opened on Mar. 18, after this article went to press). This means that “Bye Bye Kitty” prominently features, as it should, the man most likely to be at the center of the late-night action, Makoto Aida. It was Aida, not Murakami, by common consent, who was the young Japanese artist of the ’90s in Japan. His work dominated the big retrospective show “Ground Zero Japan” at Mito Tower, in the city of Mito, a landmark show organized at the turn of the millennium by leading critic Noi Sawaragi. Particularly striking was Aida’s “War Picture Returns” series, melodramatic paintings on traditional folding screens, mixing contemporary pop-cultural references with the nationalist style of Japanese war paintings from the ’30s and ’40s. “Ground Zero Japan” (which also included Murakami) explored the anguish of a now economically declining Japan, which saw its financial bubble burst in the early ’90s, followed by the massive Kobe earthquake and the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo group, both in early 1995.

In contrast, Murakami’s original “Super Flat” exhibition, first mounted in the Parco Supermarket gallery in the Shibuya district of Tokyo in early 2000, was a lightweight and rather frivolous roundup, encompassing unknown girls, pop culture icons and hip graphic designers. Yet due to Murakami’s American connections—notably with the rising Los Angeles gallery Blum & Poe and Museum of Contemporary Art curator Paul Schimmel—it was “Superflat” (its title now streamlined into one word) that made it to the U.S., arriving at L.A. MOCA in early 2001. Several years later, when New York’s Japan Society decided to mount a contemporary survey, Alexandra Munroe, then director of the gallery, knew it was “Ground Zero Japan” that should be shown in the West. Talks were held with Sawaragi, but his ideas, intensely focused on Japan, were too difficult to translate. Instead, Murakami’s show—in its revamped version, “Little Boy”—came to define the young Japanese art of the 1990s for global consumption. Aida and many of his most important contemporaries were practically airbrushed out of the story.

Aida, Mizuma gallery’s leading artist, is still producing extraordinary works. The new wall painting in “Bye Bye Kitty,” Ash Color Mountains (2011), showing infinite slag heaps of gray discarded salarymen, is just the kind of work that might inspire the audience to take a closer look into his portfolio. Aida is not really a first- or even second-tier global name. Practically the only attention he has ever had in the U.S. is the minor scandal caused when his A Picture of an Air Raid on New York City (1996) was shown at the Whitney Museum in 2003. The painting, made five years before the 9/11 attacks, depicts a Möbius loop of Mitsubishi Zeros circling over a bombed New York skyline. Yet much of “Little Boy”—named after the bomb that flattened Hiroshima—was Aida lite. Murakami is a brilliant theorist, strategist and showman, but it was Aida who, in the 1990s, pushed otaku obsessions and perversions further, grappled more compellingly with the nightmares of war and terrorist violence, and doused these themes in a more raucous humor, drawing on Japanese stand-up comedy traditions. Moreover, his command of classical Japanese styles and techniques, reworked as conceptual art in myriad paintings, installations, videos and performances, is breathtaking. Aida is a one-man operation, not a Koons-like production team akin to the one behind the Murakami brand. His output can look scattered compared to the seamless work of his rival. Yet the two recognize that they share the same roots in postwar Japan.

The art-historical importance of Aida is taken for granted in Japan, but he is one of several artists in this show who, as Elliott points out in his essay, need a lot of contextualizing. Easier to grasp are the three other typical Mizuma artists—Akira Yamaguchi, Manabu Ikeda and Hisashi Tenmyouya—making, with Aida, a full quarter of the show from this one gallery. Each produces attractive, minutely detailed graphic work in the neo-Nihonga style: updating classical motifs and techniques using postmodern irony and contemporary cultural references. Their selection here seems a way of making Aida’s brutal visions more palatable.