As a curious crowd gathered at the entrance to
Central Park at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street, a team of riggers,
steelworkers and Japanese art world figures went into action. Slowly, step
by step, a crane operator started moving a pair of psychedelic-yellow
fiberglass elephants into place.
Librado
Romero/The New York Times
Fiberglass sculptures by the artist Chinatsu Ban are
installed at Fifth Avenue and 60th Street
When the mother and baby pachyderms came to rest
on their lime green steel bases, their trunks beckoning toward a statue of
William Tecumseh Sherman just across the way at the Plaza Hotel, an
inconspicuous woman in a purple knit hat, ripped blue jeans and woolly
brown jacket began proudly posing in front of the sculptures. She was
Chinatsu Ban, 31, the creator of the public art sculpture, which is graced
by a pile of pink, green and purple dung decorated with hearts.
But the star presence was her mentor, the
contemporary artist Takashi Murakami, whose studio of a dozen or so
artists are showing their artwork around Manhattan this week.
"There's a cute culture in Japan that
everyone knows about," Mr. Murakami said of his art. "But
without digging deeper, it's hard to understand. It's like Pop Art - if
you can't understand the consumer culture in America, you can't understand
it."
The public art displays by Mr. Murakami's
associates were organized in tandem with "Little Boy: The Arts of
Japan's Exploding Subculture," a show organized by the artist that
opens to the public on Friday at the Japan Society. ("Little
Boy" is a reference to the code name used by the United States
military for the atomic bomb unleashed on Hiroshima in 1945.)
The artist Chiho Aoshima has designed a vinyl
wallpaper that will cover the Union Square subway station in May. Other
examples of work by Mr. Murakami and his stable can be found on subway
posters, wrapped around the exterior of Japan Society on East 47th Street,
and even in the windows of Louis Vuitton's Fifth Avenue store, which are
filled with cherry-decorated handbags designed by the master.
"V W X Yellow Elephant Underwear/H I J
Kiddy Elephant Underwear," the installation at Doris C. Freedman
Plaza at Central Park, was installed in collaboration with the Public Art
Fund, a nonprofit organization that presents art around the city.
Both the mother elephant - 9 feet tall, 12 feet
wide and weighing about a half ton - and the baby - 3 feet, 2½ feet wide
and 200 pounds - have wide eyes, long eyelashes, large bodies and no
mouths. Even more whimsical are their outfits: each is wearing
multicolored underpants decorated with stripes, polka dots and hearts.
"I wanted the elephants to look as though
they had just walked out of F. A. O. Schwarz," said Tom Eccles,
director of the Public Art Fund. (F. A. O. Schwarz is across the way at
58th Street.) "They're meant to create a gateway to the park, like
the lions at the Public Library. They're very contemporary but almost 19th
century in their placement, something that is both familiar and
uncanny."
Ms. Ban, the artist, speaking through an
interpreter, said she had chosen the elephant as a subject for her
sculptures because as a child she bought a small elephant figurine that
over the years became her symbol of comfort and safety. The underpants,
she said, are a symbol of protection.
While the elephants might reflect a somewhat
saccharine childlike side of contemporary Japanese art, the show at Japan
Society also thoroughly explores otaku, which translates as geek or nerd,
the Japanese subculture obsessed with fantastic and apocalyptic science
fiction, video games, manga comic books and anime.
Some works offer a peek at the darker side of
the psyche, depicting young girls smoking cigarettes or a boy with his
pants down, with suggestions of prepubescent sexual explorations and
pedophilia.
In the 1990's, Mr. Murakami became known for a
theory he called Superflat, which is derived from traditional Japanese
painting and has been adopted by the contemporary-art world to indicate a
mix of high and low art. His work explores how mass-produced entertainment
and consumerism have led to a kind of infantilization of Japanese culture
and contemporary aesthetics.
The show is a departure for Japan Society.
"We're dealing with broad areas of popular culture not simply fine
art," said Alexandra Munroe, the society's vice president for arts
and culture and the director of its gallery. "We're introducing the
youngest generation of artists we've ever shown on our walls, most were
born in the 1960's and 1970's."
Ms. Munroe said she was hoping for larger crowds
than usual for the show, which runs through July 24. It is the Public Art
Fund's first collaboration with Japan Society and the first time it has
been involved in an indoor exhibition.
In an interview at Japan Society, Mr. Murakami,
recognizable by his round wire glasses, ponytail tucked in a bun and
goatee, said he was proud that he had been able to bring his original
drawings for his manga cartoon series to New York. "A lot of these
works are unfamiliar even in Japan," he said, "It's been very
hard to organize because of complicated copyright issues with some of the
manufacturers" of some of the objects. Objects in the show range from
Hello Kitty dolls, Godzilla figures and other Japanese toys to a painting
of a mushroom cloud by Mr. Murakami.
One of the artists in the show, who identified
himself as Mr., stood out at Japan Society on Monday morning in part
because of his outfit: a camouflage-patterned sweater, green baseball cap
worn backwards, sunglasses and dyed blond hair. The artist, 35, has
created a work that includes two figures on pedestals, one of them a young
boy with his pants down around his ankles. Behind the sculptures are a
pair of paintings incorporating a male figure who is unmistakably the
artist. Mr. said the work was a comment on sexual repression in postwar
Japanese culture.
"I don't have any siblings," Mr.
added, speaking through a translator. "So I have always been
fascinated by children." - by
Carol Vogel NEW
YORK TIMES 6 Apr 2005
In the years after Japan was defeated in World
War II, the country went into a state of numbing shock. The atomic bombs
dropped on Japan not only obliterated entire cities and wiped out
generations of people, but also left the country’s citizens questioning
their identity and culture. Some of the creative results of this post-war
reflection are chronicled in Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s
Exploding Subculture. Curated by pop-cult arbiter Takashi Murakami,
the exhibit, which features work by 21 postwar Japanese artists, is on
view through July 24 at New York’s
Japan Society.
The show’s title, Little Boy, is a
double entrendre: Besides being the nickname for the bomb that flattened
Hiroshima, it also represents Murakami’s belief that Japan is a country
with an infantilized culture. As if to underline this last point, many of
the pieces in the show are in the form of animated cartoons, comic books,
and advertisements, rendered in the wildly popular Neo-Pop, anime, and
manga styles. Most of the images featured also had their origins in
children’s media, then made their way into other mainstream and
“high” art.
Yet don’t be deceived by the seemingly innocent portrayals: While some
of the pictures in the show are cute and bright, the themes are deadly
serious. Murakami’s Time Bokan–Pink, for example, depicts a
skeleton with an atomic cloud over its head, while Chiho Aoshima’sSublime
Grave Dwell Shinko is a mural-sized illustration that portrays decay
in its myriad forms. Similarly, Shigeru Komatsuzaki’s Underground
City is a stirring post-apocalyptic vision and fantasy of a safe
utopia.
“American media has been presenting Japan as a country on the brink of
recession, as a culture that’s almost defunct in some way,” says
Alexandra Monroe, the director of the Japan Society Gallery. She says she
brought the show to the U.S. “to tap into the psyche of contemporary
Japan.”
To further expose that psyche, the Japan
Society, along with New York’s Public Art Fund, will mount several
installations created by Little Boy artists. A Murakami-designed banner
will completely cover the façade of the Society, while Chinatsu Ban will
install large yellow fiberglass elephant sculptures at the southern
entrance of Central Park. Later this year, Chiho Aoshima will cover the
city’s Union Square subway station in computer-generated, large-scale
illustrations that will depict a flourishing magical landscape with
glittery trees and oversized characters.
Little Boy is the last installment of Murakami’s Superflat
trilogy, which aims to highlight contemporary Japanese artists and place
their work in a historical context. But on a simpler level, Murakami says
the exhibit also is a celebration of imagination. “The show is not about
brandishing the political scars of the war,” he explains. “The reason
I put this together was because of the completely wasteful and enchanting
creations of human creativity.” - by Andrew Yang
METROPOLIS
MAGAZINE 26 Apr 2005
