We can make another future : Japanese art after 1989

67 66 WE CAN MAKE ANOTHER FUTURE: JAPANESE ART AFTER 1989 Takashi Murakami / Japan b.1962 / Project KO2 1998 / Offset lithograph / 51.4 x 36.4cm / Gift of Dr Morris Low through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2011. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program / © Takashi Murakami. All rights reserved. EMPIRE OF SIGNS | REUBEN KEEHAN EMPIRE OF SIGNS REUBEN KEEHAN By the 1990s, Japanese consumer society had reached its feverish peak, initiating discourses centred around information overload, as well as a reassessment of cultural values. As various media consolidated the image of the Japanese city as the neon-drenched megalopolis, critic Akira Asada diagnosed a condition of ‘infantile capitalism’, where, in the absence of inherent qualities, selfhood was defined through frenzied competition, as with siblings vying for parental attention. 1 Asada reprised the earlier reflections of French literary theorist Roland Barthes, whose classic 1970 study Empire of Signs proposed that what Europeans perceived in Japanese society as obfuscation and enigma was, in fact, the abandonment of pretence to deeper meaning — that there was no eternal truth behind Japanese culture because Japan had abandoned its futile pursuit. 2 Barthes qualified his Japan as merely rhetorical, a fiction constructed for the sake of argument, but his position found purchase with artists and intellectuals of Asada’s generation. Interest in the changing textures of consumer society was not necessarily new, and senior figures — particularly those long engaged with the international Fluxus movement, such as Ay-O, Takahiko Iimura and Mieko Shiomi — maintained a significant presence with their elaborations of the capriciousness of everyday speech, commercial design and the possibilities proposed by new media technologies. Equally significant were Daido Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira, veterans of the radical photographic journal Provoke , who produced streams of images attempting to capture those aspects of the modern city which could no longer be expressed in words. But, where Moriyama and Nakahira’s gritty images bespoke a sense of unease, the new generation of artists felt at home with collapsing distinctions between high art and popular culture. Working from a position of immersion rather than critical distance, their instinctive take on appropriation was closer in spirit to the remix culture of house music than the parodic character of collage. By the late 1980s, the likes of Taro Chiezo, Katsura Funakoshi, Kodai Nakahara and Kenji Yanobe, who had emerged from the Kansai New Wave of western Japan, were developing an irreverent, furiously inventive variant of international Postmodernism that would become known as Neo Pop. The new ethos was also expressed by Mika Yoshizawa, the resolutely feminist star of the cho-shojo (supergirls) movement, who found inspiration for her abstract paintings in the contextless surfaces of domestic objects and manga covers. It was also revealed in Miran Fukuda’s beautifully executed paintings of advertising brochures and fairytale illustrations, and in the cut-up aesthetic of Shinro Ohtake’s voluminous scrapbooks and deconstructed junk sculptures. The most prominent and influential manifestation, however, was expressed by a loose grouping of Tokyo provocateurs galvanised by the work of the Kansai group, whose number included energetic organisers Masato Nakamura and Takashi Murakami. Both drew fervently on art history and theory — Nakamura’s brash appropriations of fluorescent signs from convenience stores and fast-food chains toyed with the sensory and symbolic dimensions of American Minimal art, while Murakami created a discourse, which he would market to the world as ‘Superflat’, conflating the erosion of cultural hierarchies, particularly high art and popular culture, with the absence of linear perspective characterising Japanese visual culture. Their privileging of the visual and the vernacular, particularly Murakami’s production line appropriation of the otaku idioms of manga and anime, had a powerful effect on the reception of Japanese art internationally. Murakami’s aesthetic shared many sympathies with that of Yoshitomo Nara, not least because Nara’s irreverent paintings, drawings and sculptures claimed punk rock and comic books, rather than art history, as major influences. As Murakami and Nara consolidated their positions, both holding their first solo museum exhibitions in 2001, influential Japanese art journal Bijutsu Techo ( Art Notes ) registered the influence on a new generation of artists of the locality-based projects of Masato Nakamura’s command N group and the ‘consultation art’ of Tsuyoshi Ozawa, which observed a more ‘communicative approach’ grounded in daily life and characterised by humility. 3 The theme would be reprised by critic Midori Matsui under the name ‘Micropop’, a general tendency embracing the ‘micropolitical’, with popular culture and individuated experience as its source, and reasonably conventional media, particularly drawing, as its outlet. 4 Not all practices were image-based, however, and sculpture and installation experienced a revival in the late 2000s as an alternative means of exploring the visual in the information age, through the work of Teppei Kaneuji, Kohei Nawa, Motohiko Odani, Shinji Ohmaki, Paramodel, Yuken Teruya and Hiraki Sawa. Though many of these artists’ practices worked through pop motifs and existential dilemmas, they also provided valuable reflections on shifting regimes of vision and representation. ENDNOTES 1 Akira Asada, ‘Infantile capitalism and Japan’s Postmodernism: A fairy tale’, in Masao Miyoshi and Harry Harootunian (eds), Postmodernism and Japan , Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1989, pp.273–8. 2 Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs , trans. Richard Howard, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1982. 3 Yukie Kamiya, ‘Aiming for a feasible utopia’, Bijutsu Techo , February 2002. 4 Midori Matsui, The Age of Micropop: The New Generation of Japanese Artists , Parco Publishing, Tokyo, 2007.