Art461 @ McNeese State University
India, China, Japan
Aline Baldwin
Instructor
!!The content of the course is presented in the Unit lectures. Each Unit exam is based on the unit lectures!!
Meet some Contemporary Japanese Artists
Click on the image of the artists for a link to their work
A member of the Superflat movement (founded by legendary Japanese artist Takashi Murakami), Chiho Aoshima is best known for her fantastical urban pop creatures and landscapes. She started working with graphic art in Murakami’s factory, Aoshima creates surreal dreamscapes inhabited by ghosts, demons, young women and elements of nature. Her artwork is typically large-scale and printed on paper with materials such as leather and plastic, for texture. Her works depicted a utopian world in which time is suspended and organic creatures are one with otherwise inanimate things.
Chiharu Shiota is a performance and installation artist who creates large-scale installations. She uses themes of memory and oblivion, dreams and reality, past and present, and the confrontation of anxiety. Her most celebrated works involve webs of black thread that enclose a variety of household and personal objects, such as old chairs, a burned piano, and a wedding dress. Her installation, Perspectives (2004), made with more than 300 donated shoes accompanied by handwritten notes from each donor, confiding one personal memory. Shiota then connected the shoes with strands of red yarn, each suspended from the same hook.
Ei Arakawa is inspired by states of change, periods of instability, happy accidents and elements of risk. His performance pieces and installations involve themes of collectivity, friendship, simultaneity and improvisation. Arakawa’s work is almost always collaborative, and engages with art’s element of social spectacle – from production to destruction. At Frieze London in 2014, Arakawa and his brother Tomoo presented a performance work entitled Does This Soup Taste Ambivalent? in which the pair offered soup to visitors, reputedly made with Fukushima’s ‘radioactive’ daikon roots.
Mariko Mori creates multimedia works in video, photography, new media and installation art. She expresses a minimalist, futuristic vision through sleek, surreal forms. A recurring theme in Mori’s work is the juxtaposition of Eastern mythology with Western culture, as seen in her digitally layered images. Mori came to prominence with Wave UFO, which debuted at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, in 2003. Subsequently, this piece traveled to New York and was later included in the 2005 Venice Biennale. In 2010, Mori founded the Faou Foundation, an educational organization through which she dedicated a series of her own harmonious, site-specific permanent art installations to honor the six habitable continents.
Takashi Murakami is one of Japan’s most iconic contemporary artists. From paintings to large-scale sculptures and fashion collaborations, Murakami’s work is influenced by manga and anime. Founder of the Superflat movement and the Kaikai Kiki artist collective, Murakami has developed and supported the careers of many of his contemporaries. The term ‘superflat’ describes both the aesthetic characteristics of the Japanese artistic tradition and the nature of post-war Japanese culture and society. Tradition left a legacy of flat, two-dimensional imagery, with emphasis on flat planes of color, which has been re-elaborated in contemporary culture through manga and anime.
Tatsuo Miyajima is a sculptor and installation artist whose highly technological works employ contemporary materials such as electric circuits, video and computers, centered on the use of gadgets since the 1980s. Miyajima’s core artistic concepts draw inspiration from humanist ideas and Buddhist teachings. The LED counters in his installations continuously flash in repetition from 1 to 9, symbolizing the journey from life to death, but avoiding finality, represented by 0 never appears in his work. His ever-present numerals, presented in grids, towers and circuits, express his interest in continuity, eternity and the flow of time and space.
With a career spanning seven decades, Yayoi Kusama has explored the realms of painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, performance, film, printmaking, installation and environmental art. Kusama has developed a highly distinctive style of polka-dotted art, which has since become her trademark. Such illusory visions are, for Kusama, the product of hallucinations she has experienced since childhood, in which the world seems to be covered in proliferating forms. She covers entire rooms with colorful dots and ‘infinity’ mirrors.
Yoshitomo Nara creates paintings, sculptures and drawings depicting his signature wide-eyed children and dogs – subjects that attempt to capture a child-like sense of boredom and frustration and recapture the fierce independence natural to children. Reminiscent of traditional book illustrations, his aesthetic presents a restless tension, partly influenced by Nara’s love of punk rock. The titles of his works are testimony to this, from The Girl With the Knife in Her Side (1991) to Silent Violence (1998), Neurotic to the Bone (1999) and There Is Nothing (2000). In 2011, New York City’s Asia Society Museum held his first major solo exhibition, titled ‘Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool’, comprising work that spans the artist’s 20-year career. The works on show were intimately connected to the sensibilities of youth