Kitty!!!
New York
until 12 June
“This is grown up art, created for the most part by artists who are little-known here in the United States,” says exhibition organizer David Elliott, a noted independent curator who has directed several major modern art museums, including Tokyo's Mori Art Museum, Stockholm's Moderna Museet, Oxford’s MoMA and Istanbul’s Modern. The 16 participating artists range in age from their late 20s to their mid-40s, with the exception of the senior Yoshitomo Nara, well known both in Japan and the West for his engagement with popular manga culture, who contributes the touchstone work of the exhibition: a color photograph of two large, symmetrical “Hello Kitty” polychrome stone figures atop a beautifully maintained gray granite gravestone (2008).
“Bye Bye Kitty!!! is very much in dialogue with the themes raised five years ago in Little Boy, a milestone exhibition at Japan Society Gallery organized by the artist Takashi Murakami,” says Joe Earle, Director of Japan Society Gallery. “The artists represented in this exhibition, however, have a less ironic, more dynamic and varied view of the world, reflecting a wide range of personal histories and agendas.”
Many of the paintings, sculptures, photographs, installations, and videos in Bye, Bye Kitty!!! illustrate the manner in which today’s vanguard artists in Japan freely and creatively sample Japanese pictorial conventions, ultimately reframing tradition—whether it be the conservative aesthetic of traditional Japanese painting and sculpture, the graphic ingenuity of Ukiyo-e prints, or neo-traditional styles developed in the early decades of the last century.
A two-panel work by Makoto Aida, for instance, emulates the traditional decorative form of painted screens, but with imagery—two massively heroic schoolgirls squared off against one another, each hoisting a South Korean or a Japanese flag aloft—that is a biting commentary on today’s uneasy East Asian relations. Similarly, in a large-scale triptych entitled Defeat at the Single Blow, Robust and Magnificent Feature, Gallant and Brave Behavior (2008), Hisashi Tenmyouya supplants the religious imagery one would expect from the format with a depiction of battle as a feral experience. In two views of Narita International Airport (2005), Yamaguchi Akira employs the pictorial devices associated with the 17th-century “famous views” of Kyoto, only to insert scenes of environmental despoliation within the familiar golden, misty clouds (which one now suspects are petrochemical smog). Other works in the show meditate on the natural environment and our precarious relationship with it. Haruka Kojin, at 27 the youngest artist in the exhibition, contributes an eerily reflective installation made from multi-hued cut paper forms that seem to float in space. Rinko Kawauchi’s constellation of 46 different-sized photographs depicts the minutiae of moments in an allusive world.
“Here we see Japanese artists critically examining tradition and history; responding to a threatened natural world; and expressing an unquiet, even nightmarish, consciousness,” says Elliott. “Taken together, these three approaches comprise a quintessentially Japanese response to the present and the future.”
Three new works of art will be unveiled in Bye Bye Kitty!!!. Kohei Nawa is currently preparing a taxidermized deer covered with a skin of crystal glass balls to form an irregular, globular skin that confounds expectations of sight and touch. Tomoko Shioyasu is making a large-scale installation, employing a version of the decorous Japanese art of stencil cutting to snip, slit, cut and slice a ten-foot sheet of paper into a membrane-like form that animates surrounding space with projected light. Chiharu Shiota’s installation Dialogue with Absence, recently unveiled in Paris, combines a painted wedding dress with pumps, tubing, and red-dyed water to create an umbilical network of linked veins that suggests a dreamlike, unconscious state of anxiety.
The 16 artists represented in Bye Bye Kitty!!!, half of them women, are Makoto Aida (b.1965); Manabu Ikeda (b.1973); Tomoko Kashiki (b.1982); Rinko Kawauchi (b.1972); Haruka Kojin (b.1983); Kumi Machida (b.1970); Yoshitomo Nara (b.1959); Kohei Nawa (b.1975); Motohiko Odani (b.1972); Hiraki Sawa (b.1977); Chiharu Shiota (b.1972); Tomoko Shioyasu (b.1981); Hisashi Tenmyouya (b.1966); Yamaguchi Akira (b.1969); Miwa Yanagi (b.1967); Tomoko Yoneda (b.1965).
Catalogue
Yale University Press has published a comprehensive catalogue to accompany the exhibition. Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art features essays by exhibition organizer David Elliott and Tetsuya Ozaki, the publisher and former chief editor of ART iT magazine and RealTokyo.com. Elliott’s essay provides a survey of the artists and explores many of the social issues facing Japan today, including the rise of feminism, the decline of the “salaryman,” and the latent instability of an aging, shrinking society. Ozaki illuminates the history and culture of Japan's current Heisei era. (Bye, Bye Kitty!!! retails in bookstores and online nationwide for $35.00.)
Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art is generously supported by Yasko Tashiro and Thierry Porté; Edward and Anne Studzinski; Chris A. Wachenheim; Masako and Jim Shinn; Charina Endowment Fund; Minoru Mori, President and Chief Executive Officer, Mori Building Co., Ltd.; the Dedalus Foundation Inc.; The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc.; Barbara Bertozzi Castelli; Margot Paul Ernst; Ota Fine Arts; and the Leadership Committee for Bye Bye Kitty!!!. Further significant funding has been received from the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York State’s 62 counties and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. Media sponsorship is provided by WNYC. Transportation assistance is provided by Japan Airlines. Exhibitions at Japan Society are made possible in part by the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Endowment Fund and the Friends of the Gallery. Japan Society also wishes to thank The W. L. S. Spencer Foundation for its catalogue support.
Yoshitomo Nara (1959– ) untitled, 2008
C-print, 10 1/2 × 7 7/8 in. (26.6 × 20 cm). Courtesy Tomio Koyama Gallery. Copyright © Yoshitomo Nara
Makoto Aida (1965– ) Harakiri School Girls, 2002
Print on transparency film, holographic film, acrylic, 46 3/4 × 33 3/8 in. (119 × 84.7 cm). Courtesy Mizuma Art Gallery. Photo: Kei Miyajima. Watai Collection. Copyright © AIDA Makoto
Manabu Ikeda (1973– ) Ark, 2005
Pen and acrylic ink on paper, mounted on board, 35 1/4 × 51 3/8 in. (89.5 × 130.5 cm). Photo: Keizo KIOKU. Courtesy Mizuma Art Gallery. Mori Art Museum. Copyright © IKEDA Manabu
Tomoko Kashiki (1982– ) In a Box, 2008
Acrylic, carbon, ink, and collage on cotton, mounted on wood panel, 51 × 63 3/4 in. (130.3 × 162 cm). Private collection, Tokyo
Kumi Machida (1970–) Rocking Horse, 2010
Sumi (blue), sumi (brown), mineral pigments, other pigments, and color pencil on kumohada linen paper, 55 × 44 1/2 in. (140 × 113 cm). Collection of the artist
Kohei Nawa (1975-)PixCell Deer #24, 2011
Taxidermized deer, crystal glass balls. Approximately 53 ˝ x 52 x 25 in., with plinth 59 x 59 x 12 in.
Motohiko Odani (1972– ) SP Extra: Malformed Noh-Mask Series Half Skeleton’s Twins: Tosaka, 2008
Wood, natural mineral pigment, Japanese lacquer, paulownia-wood box, and other media, 8 5/8 × 7 5/8 × 2 3/4 in. (21.5 × 19.5 × 7 cm). Courtesy YAMAMOTO GENDAI
Yamaguchi Akira (1969– ) Postmodern Silly Battle: Headquarters of the Silly Forces, 2001
Oil and watercolor on canvas, 72 3/4 × 30 in. (185 × 76 cm). Photo: Keizo KIOKU. Courtesy Mizuma Art Gallery. Takahashi Collection. Copyright © YAMAGUCHI Akira
Miwa Yanagi (1967– ) My Grandmothers/HYONEE, 2007
C print, plexiglass, text panel, 51 1/4 × 39 3/8 in. (130 × 100 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Yoshiko Isshiki Office. Private collection, New York. Copyright © Miwa Yanagi
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