Bye Bye Little Boy

In works like the vividly graphic Harakiri Schoolgirls (2002), Aida can sometimes seem misogynistic, so Elliott takes care to balance male and female artists in the show. Murakami and Nara have worked rich seams—following both traditional Japanese convention and Western taste—by consistently infantilizing women. Murakami took this further by becoming a Svengali figure for any number of handpicked young female artists, employed and represented by his Kaikai Kiki organization. These are his “Tokyo girls,” plucked out of nowhere art schools or his regular GEISAI amateur art competitions to become stars via his “Superflat” and “Little Boy” shows.

Elliott’s riposte has been to include in “Bye Bye Kitty” several rather more grown-up women artists, very much in control of their work and their representation. Women in fact make up half the show. Appearing with installation artist Chiharu Shiota and neo-Nihonga artist Kumi Machida, Miwa Yanagi is perhaps the most representative. In his essay, Elliott couples Yanagi with Aida as the main entry point to the show. Her elaborately staged photographic works play with the iconography of popular culture in baroque, grotesque, and often disturbing ways. Elliott wanted the bizarre and gargantuan “Windswept Women”: those Amazonian figures with bulbous thighs and shriveled breasts, looming against a mythical fairy-tale background, which bombed at the Venice Biennale in 2009. No one was sure where to place them in current curatorial trends; they also sit uneasily with theoretical feminism. So instead, with space a problem, Elliot chose a few safer options from the series “My Grandmothers” (2000-04), in which young women imagine their lives when they are old, wrinkled and gray.

In truth, major women artists in Japan are still less numerous than men, although the art world there is increasingly influenced by women curators and dealers. And female artists, empowered by picking up cameras since the early 1990s, have recently featured as leaders in Japan’s cutting-edge photography scene. Elliott has selected two other formally distinct exemplars, Rinko Kawauchi and Tomoko Yoneda. Kawauchi shares something of the throwaway esthetic of Japan’s popular “girly photography”—street snaps of everyday scenes or objects made by girls with handheld cameras. Her work, like theirs, was produced first for best-selling books, not gallery walls. Yoneda, on the other hand, is a cerebral conceptualist who uses documentary research and carefully composed images to capture the absence left behind after history moves on from locations of great violence or drama: here, a series of almost blank photos taken in an abandoned South Korean military headquarters.

Beyond this, Elliott lays his bets on artists like Motohiko Odani, fresh from a major success at the Mori Art Museum, represented in “Bye Bye Kitty” with a series of grotesquely altered Noh masks. Missing, though, is the also very gothic and commercially appealing video installation artist Tabaimo. Well known for her hypnotic animated narratives, which deal directly with many of the dysfunctions and anxieties of Japanese society since the disasters of the early ’90s, she was listed in early previews of the selection. But perhaps she has simply become too big—or too busy—for the group show, given that she will have the Japanese pavilion to herself at the Venice Biennale this year. Whatever the story, there’s a hole, since her work illustrates so well many of the themes Elliott advances.

Tabaimo and Odani are archetypal artists of the “floating generation,” as Tokyo cultural commentator Tetsuya Ozaki calls it in his essay for the catalogue. These artists turned to an esthetic very different from that of the pop- and sub-culture obsessed ’60s generation of Aida, Murakami and Nara, who grew up surrounded by consumer toys and imaginative possibilities. Anyone who left college in the early ’90s or after, in contrast, came of age in a world where opportunities and hope had been dashed. This moment is easiest to see in the refined, cool and rather clinical style of Hiraki Sawa [see A.i.A., Mar. ’11] and Kohei Nawa, as they explore the anachronistic potential of evolving technology. Pop sensibility has given way to a slow, almost scientific analysis in the white glow of Sawa’s video screens, traversed by wry, illogical fantasies, and in Nawa’s installations of objects acquired from Web auctions and artificially pixelated with plastic. Nawa also often works with architects, sharing the same experimental methodologies, and emphasis on new materials and sustainable ideals, that have animated Japan’s “post-Bubble” architecture.

So is the Japan Society seeking a repeat performance, or quietly absolving itself for the laughing, manga-eyed pop monster it created in 2005? This question lies at the very heart of the struggle to represent Japanese contemporary art. Elliott, as a rare foreign curator who was around long enough to know the true story of the 1990s and after, offers a better-grounded alternative. Yet the real action today in Japan is far more ambitious than this show suggests. Much of it is taking place far from the city museums and galleries, in community art festivals and rural revitalization schemes, such as the international Echigo Tsumari and Setouchi festivals, which in recent summers have brought a host of artists and visitors to largely abandoned islands and crumbling villages. Art is finding a role for itself in ways that reflect contemporary Japan’s most urgent theme: how a society comes to terms with itself some 20 years after the economic bubble burst, after Japan, Inc., ceased to present the vision of an alternate Asian modernity.

The fact is that, however brilliant contemporary art may be in Japan, it will go international only if there are cultural entrepreneurs who are smart and energetic enough to make it happen. This was Murakami’s great success, in alliance with his Western curators, dealers, collectors and fans. Back home in Japan, many people are tired of playing the global game. Murakami is famous there, yes; but he is neither loved nor much respected. Increasingly, the Japanese contemporary art world is content to simply talk to itself. And, despite what is implied in the catalogue foreword by the Japan Society’s president, Motoatsu Sakurai, the “Bye Bye Kitty” artists are not the next generation after Murakami. There is nothing new or fresh about Aida and Yanagi, or even Odani and Nawa. They have been around for years, working without much international recognition. For some of these very fine Japanese artists, it may be now or never.

Currently On View “Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art,” Japan Society, New York, through June 12.