japonisme
Murakami Takashi - 272
The Occident just loves the Orient. And of all the Orient, we seem to love Japan with most fervour. Western writers, artists and intellectuals have been drawing inspirations from Japan for centuries – Vincent van Gogh and Mary Cassatt were both fascinated by ukiyoe prints, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound and Bertold Brecht all showed great interest in Japanese culture. Some theories indicate that James Joyce’s famous, impenetrable ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ structurally echoes the noh play Kakitsubata (杜若), which was translated roughly into English by Pound in 1916 and therefore would have been accessible to Joyce, though there is little mention of it in most of the annotations/ explanations attached to this opaque novel.
The term ‘Japonisme’ (meaning Western fascination with Japanese culture) was coined by the French art critic Philippe Burty in 1872, but unlike many others remains a current trend – not only is our consumer market flooded with aibo, pokemon, hello kitty, gundam and yu-gi-oh, but our high culture pays serious homage to Japanese artists – Murakami Haruki’s novels are translated into dozens of European languages, and Murakami Takashi’s paintings and sculptures fetch auction prices that climb into millions (I especially liked a short article in The Gawker entitled ‘Jack-Off Sculpture Sells For $15 Million‘, about the sale of Murakami’s sculpture ‘My Lonesome Cowboy. To the sculpture’s defense, I was lucky enough to see the original in Tokyo back in 2001 and I have to say it is a thing of beauty… :)
What is it, though, that we love so much about Japanese visual arts? Is it the marked ‘alien’ feel of something that obviously did not originate from within the Western civilisation? Is it the opaque, clean cuteness – prettiness – of Japanese art and design that leaves any hope of gleaning the meaning behind the work in the realm of pure wishful thinking? Is it because the works seem to revel in their own apparent lack of depth? I seem to remember an anecdote about Murakami Haruki attending a lecture at the faculty of literature of some US university, where the professor was asking his students to give their understanding of the symbolic meaning of the vanishing elephant in Murakami’s story ‘The Elephant Vanishes’. Before the students could voice their interpretations, Murakami said ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, but the vanishing elephant had no symbolic meaning. It was merely an elephant. That vanished.’ or something to that effect. Upon the professor’s insistance that surely this image must be symbolic, Murakami responded with a laconic phrase – ‘Sometimes an elephant is just an elephant.’
Murakami Takashi - 'Eye Love' for Louis Vuitton, acrylic on canvas, 2004
Now this is a major difference between a Japanese artist and a Western one (if you will forgive a gross generalisation) – where all our artists wish to imbue additional levels of meaning and depth even to works that almost evidently have none – here is a man trying earnestly to deny that his highly surreal work has any depth at all. Now if we put aside our skeptical wondering about whether this apparent shallowness – flatness (Murakami Takashi had a famous exhibition entitled Super-Flat – flatness is practically his signature characteristic) – is merely a cover screen for more shalowness and flatness, we are still left with the question – why are we so drawn to this approach?
Leaving Murakami Haruki aside for a moment (as I can never shake the sneaking suspicion that he is – as Oscar Wilde would quaintly put it – a Sphinx Without a Secret), Murakami Takashi’s success is intuitively logical to me. His work is full of dichotomy. It is cute and a little scary. It is both friendly and manic. It is high art produced in a factory. It seems simple, but employs sophisticated and ancient artistic techniques. (Though most of his work is done in a recognisable acrylic cartoon style, Murakami majored in Nihonga – traditional 19th century Japanese art styles – at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, and the works from his student days (difficult to dig up on the Web – it’s all round eyes and mushrooms with teeth now) show both talent and skill in traditional art forms) His work is highly commercialised (keychain, postcard, signed print anyone? I’ve got all of the above in my collection) and yet the feeling lingers on that the meaning of the work is not trivialised by this multiplication – possibly even its meaning grows deeper with it – or am I just getting sucked into the trap…….?