 
Godzilla, Hello Kitty and her fellow feline Doraemon are among the cast of characters making an appearance in Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture, an exhibition at the Japan Society that's packed with all the punch of a pachinko parlor. However, much more than just fun and games, the show reveals what lies beneath the candy-colored surface.
Curated by Japan's neo-Pop answer to Warhol, the artist and intermittent Louis Vuitton handbag designer Takashi Murakami, Little Boy is out to show that the cutesy critters, doe-eyed prepubescents and science fiction fantasies that permeate Japan's pop culture are a deeply embedded response to World War II and its aftermath. To illustrate the point, Murakami has brought together hundreds of objects—from contemporary artists' works to television show excerpts, vintage toys and a plethora of plush regional mascot characters called Yuru Chara—to create a repository of Japan's kawaii (or "cute") and otaku (or, roughly translated, "geek") culture. The former is exemplified by the likes of Hello Kitty. The latter, by anime films, manga comic strips, monster movies and what might be seen as an unhealthy infatuation with schoolgirls.
Taken together, according to Murakami, these two threads express Japan's collective emasculation and infantilization in the wake of humiliating military defeat and subsequent occupation. The title Little Boy, after all, refers not only to the code name for the bomb that nearly obliterated Hiroshima in 1945, but also to Japan's ongoing military and political dependence on the foreign power that dropped it. The cuteness has a dark underbelly.
For example, the painter Aya Takano portrays guileless young girls, along with bunnies and kittens, who are fetishized with the same sense of powerlessness with which the freakishly proportioned boys in nearby paintings by Yoshitomo Nara seem to watch themselves pee. Kenji Yanobe, an artist who visited Chernobyl in 1997, has expressed his own internalized fear of radiation with an installation of men wearing protective gear. One life-size version stands among a field of miniatures, with several crawling out of his mouth. Elsewhere, the show includes futuristic battle-scene drawings by the graphic artist Shigeru Komatsuzaki, while an episode of Ultraman ends with the superhero surveying a cityscape with a burning sky that's either the color of the rising sun or Armageddon.
At times, it's difficult to tell whether you're looking at art or some other pop cultural artifact. However, Japan has never distinguished between the fine and applied arts the way that the West does. At the same time, it's not a place where uncomfortable topics tend to be discussed openly. And so Little Boy sheds light on how a traumatized and repressed national psyche has confronted its recent past with escapist fantasies that have become, in many ways, all-consuming.
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Artist Anthony Goicolea has returned to the regular New York gallery circuit with his first show at Postmasters. Sheltered Life resonates with the same puerile obsessiveness of Goicolea's earlier photographic works, in which domestic and outdoor scenes are overrun with digitally-manipulated images of the artist getting into mischief with himself. However, Goicolea has now added drawings of adolescents in mysterious fairy-tale narratives—in forests and on rafts and canoes—that have been rendered all the more ghostly on superimposed sheets of semi-transparent vellum. New photographs are hauntingly composed of figures, many wearing red hoodies, within landscapes where boats have washed ashore, dogs bark up trees and a dead pig is readied for roasting beside a makeshift shelter. Meanwhile, an installation, consisting of a video played inside a replica of a barn, tells of a young boy's paranoid fear of being kidnapped with a moody intensity that steals the show.
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Shoptart
01, 22, 16. Nope, it’s not bingo night; it's the numerical filing system at Maison Martin Margiela. Adding to the mathematical fun is a new line of fine jewelry in absurdist proportions and scale. Also this month: Comme de Garçons for H&M, Louis Vuitton and more. By Franklin Melendez  Hint Shop
If Rad Hourani were writing this blurb, it would be over already. That's because, for the soon-to-explode French-Canadian designer, it's all about extreme minimalism. Thus, the concept behind this one-size-fits-all, unisex, sleeveless T-shirt—printed with the dates and times of a calendar—is that it can be worn by anyone, anytime. Message Boards
"Madonna starves herself on a raw macrobiotic kosher vegan kaballah diet and works out three hours a day to maintain the physique of a 12-year-old gymnast boy, and then has the cheeks of a 300-pound woman implanted into her face. And her forehead is like a plastic baby's bottom. It's like Nicole Kidman's forehead at the height of her botox addiction, and we all remember how unfortunate that era was." |
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