Beyond The Cult Of Kawaii: Breaking The Otaku Effigy

Kitty-chan looms on Park Avenue... in protest? Photo via Shawnhoke.com.

Awareness of Japanese art is diametrically opposed. People tend to either appreciate reverent mediums like ukiyo-e paintings, uki-e, kano, kyoto, nanga, rinpa, tosa, etc., or relish the populist mass media production of anime and manga art. With this edification, what emerges is a culture that is either an idiom of traditionalism or predominantly an expression of a pubescent child that fetishizes the most mundane event as an oblique sexual manifestation masked by cute innocence.

Japan Society has covered the range, with the former represented by the current Hakuin exhibit and recent shows focusing on the art of Kuniyoshi and Zeshin. The latter phenomenon was sumptuously articulated in Japan Society's 2005 exhibition Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture  curated by Takashi Murakami.

Well, Japan Society is about to inject a new piece to the proverbial puzzle of Japanese art.

Opening spring 2012, Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art is a deliciously titled exhibit that goes far beyond stereotypes of the latest Japanese art and ideas. Curated by David Elliott, founding Director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum and hot off the 17th Biennale of Sydney, the show features 16 emerging and mid-career artists whose paintings, objects, photographs, videos, and installations meld traditional styles with challenging visions of Japan’s troubled present and uncertain future.

Japan Society Gallery Director Joe Earle notes the exhibit "celebrates the 'beyond cute' generation, introducing a group of younger artists whose work marks a clean break from the kawaii orthodoxy of the last decade. The show will offer a feast for the senses, demolishing preconceptions about contemporary Japan."

Why are we talking about this now, when there is plenty of time to catch the current exhibits The Sound of One Hand and oxherding? Joe Earle gives a sneak peek of Bye Bye Kitty!!! on November 16 at FIT’s Katie Murphy Amphitheatre. The lecture is part of an amazing range of programming concerning contemporary Japanese culture in conjunction with FIT’s exhibition Japan Fashion Now. Admission is FREE, though a reservation is required. Hope you can stop by and hope you are ready to get beyond cute!

S.H.

Brutes, Beauties & Beasts

Calling all manga lovers!

Sign up for one or more two-hour sessions with internationally acclaimed artist, Hiroki Otsuka, Japan Society’s Mangaka-in-Residence. Start your visit by seeing our exhibition: Graphic Heroes, Magic Monsters: Japanese Prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi from the Arthur R. Miller Collection.

Choose one or more of the five themes from the show as the inspiration for your character: Warriors, Beautiful Women, Theater, Landscapes, and Humor. Workshops take place on the first floor in the Murase room amidst a bamboo garden and an indoor waterfall.

Starting March 13th!

The first residency of its kind in the United States in terms of content, scale and breadth of public engagement, Hiroki Otsuka will create an original full-length manga (Japanese style comic book) inspired by the work of Kuniyoshi—often working on site and visible to visitors. In addition, Otsuka lends his talents to an array of related activities, including the illustration workshops for the general public and New York City high school students (mentioned above), devising and judging an international manga competition, blogging about his work and experience at Japan Society, and creating original Kuniyoshi-inspired artwork to be made available to the public.

Otsuka will also participate in Japan Society's food-themed all-day festival j-CATION (April 10), and the Society's second annual cosplay event, Cosplay Party 2.0 (May 15), for which he will create promotional artwork.

"Kuniyoshi's love of complex narrative, his busy, frenetic style, his powerful characterization, his inventive use of space, and his mass-market appeal all mark him as a grandfather of contemporary manga," says Joe Earle, Director of Japan Society Gallery and organizer of Graphic Heroes, Magic Monsters. "We are underlining the parallels between Kuniyoshi’s work and contemporary manga by asking Hiroki Otsuka—an outstanding manga artist living in New York—to serve as our mangaka-in-residence, inspiring visitors by creating his own meta-narrative about Kuniyoshi and his work."

Otsuka's yet-to-be titled original manga, which begins production on the March 12 opening of Graphic Heroes Magic Monsters, centers on a teenager who comes to Japan Society's exhibition as part of a school group. The student literally gets drawn into the artwork as a Kuniyoshi-inspired warrior and is called on to save New York City from the multitude of monsters marauding throughout Kuniyoshi's prints.

Kuniyoshi Mention in Time Out New York & The New Yorker

While The New Yorker is featuring Kuniyoshi's “Hatsuhana Prays Under a Waterfall” on their Goings On About Town page, Time Out New York noted that

"Nobody at Japan Society would blame you for confusing Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s richly hued paintings of muscular samurai warriors facing off against wild-eyed sea monsters and evil spiders with a graphic-novel illustration. In fact, in its new exhibit, the institution seeks to further emphasize the strong connection between the 19th-century Japanese artist—who created more than 10,000 works in his lifetime—and contemporary manga and anime...The exhibit is divided into subsections (“Warriors,” “Beautiful Women,” etc.) that highlight both the artist’s range (creepy skeleton prints might be mere steps from a quiet, serene portrait of Mount Fuji) and his marketability."

Above is Kuniyoshi's Ariōmaru Kills a Giant Octopus, circa 1833-1835. In Japanese medieval military chronicles Ariō was a servant of Priest Shunkan who gave particularly loyal service during Shunkan's banishment and death on Kikai island. The inscription in the top right of the picture tells how Ariō killed a giant octopus during his journey to Kikai island to join his master.

The gallery opens this Friday!

Japan Society in New York Mag

New York magazine featured our upcoming Utagawa Kuniyoshi exhibit in their Art section! Here's an excerpt from their attentive and generous review:

"In an almost 50-year career, spanning the first half of the nineteenth century, Kuniyoshi pushed across boundaries. He uses every part of the frame, deploying strong colors and powerful forms. He also works many genres: landscapes, beautiful women, actors, cats, and mythical animals, not to mention the battles of samurai and legendary heroes for which he is best known. Formally, he is brilliantly innovative: His three-panel compositions revolutionized Japanese art by spreading one image over an entire triptych. Less obviously (at least from our vantage point), he fought the censorship that was imposed in Japan in 1842, fashioning colorful scenes of monsters and demons that contain oblique symbols. They were subtle enough that the bureaucracy permitted his work to be published and widely distributed, while his knowledgeable audience could spot the subtext.

The immediacy of these prints helped attract crowds to last year’s Kuniyoshi retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and it should do the same when the exhibition comes to the Japan Society on March 12. It’s nearly all drawn from the collection of Arthur R. Miller, who taught civil procedure at Harvard Law for 36 years, has moderated several acclaimed public-television series on the law, and is now a professor at NYU. “Power,” he said, when I asked what it was about Kuniyoshi that initially captivated him. “I’ve always liked military history, and I liked the images of the samurai and the warriors.” Over 30 years, Miller has acquired close to 2,000 of the 10,000 prints that the artist is thought to have produced."

Notes from the Gallery

Your third sneak peek of our upcoming exhibition Graphic Heroes, Magic Monsters: Japanese Prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi from the Arthur R. Miller Collection comes to you from The New Yorker, who featured us in their much coveted “On the Horizon” section.

Notes from the Gallery

This is your second sneak peak of our upcoming exhibition: Graphic Heroes, Magic Monsters: Japanese Prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi from the Arthur R. Miller Collection.

(Missed the first sneak peak? Find it here)

 

The New York Times gave us a shout-out with a short article featuring the new exhibit and they made sure to mention the special treat we have for you. Japan Society is selling prints of the originals showcased at the exhibit! Right now, they're available online in three sizes, framed (in black, gold or espresso wood frames) or unframed, for $75 to $500.

Here's a snippet from The Times:

"The show includes more than 130 works by Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), a master of color woodblock prints — among them, vivid images like that of a warrior stabbing himself in the mouth with a sword and a boy grappling with a giant carp. Thirty-six of those prints, including the one above of a Buddhist monk hiking on a snow-covered mountain, can be purchased as very high-quality digitalized prints, even before the show opens. Although, as Joe Earle, the director of the Japan Society Gallery, noted: “The prints you buy are not the actual size of the ones in the show — some are bigger than the original, and some are smaller. This is to prevent anyone from passing them off as original prints.”"

Notes from the Gallery

Goodbye Serizawa! We'll miss you!

Today, the exhibit is getting deconstructed. Loud bangs and outrageous crashes have been emanating from the 2nd floor all morning. All the noise keeps ricocheting up the staircase. If for some unfortunate reason, you couldn't make the fabulous Serizawa exhibit, you can always check out some of the pieces on our online gallery. It's sad to hear it go.

But in order to create, one must first destroy, right? Our next exhibit looks super cool! Its official title is: Graphic Heroes, Magic Monsters: Japanese Prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi from the Arthur R. Miller Collection and it's going to run from March 12th to June 13th.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi's vivid scenes from history and legend, wildly popular 150 years ago, are a major influence on the work of today's manga and anime artists. This exhibition features over 100 dramatic depictions of giant spiders, skeletons and toads; Chinese ruffians; women warriors; haggard ghosts; and desperate samurai combat.

I. Can't. Wait.

Since all of February is going to be dedicated to putting together the new exhibit, there will definitely be more posts about Utagawa through the coming weeks.

Here's your first sneak peak: