EXHIBITION REVIEW

Bye Bye Kitty!!!

Midori Yoshimoto

Sixteen Japanese artists consented to gather under the catchy

banner Bye Bye Kitty!!! to combat the prevailing cult of kawaii, cute, in
the spring 2011 exhibition at Japan Society, New York (fig. 1). The eponymous catalogue Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary
Japanese Art by David Elliott, with a contribution by Tetsuya Ozaki, and
published by the Japan Society and Yale University Press, is available in
softcover for $35 at shop.japansociety.org.
According to the guest curator, David Elliott, the former director of
Tokyos Mori Art Museum and now an independent curator based in
Berlin, the premise of the show emerged in reaction to Takashi Murakamis
Little Boy exhibition held at Japan Society six years ago.1 In the catalogue
to Little Boy, Murakami offers his version of a psychoanalytic theory
of Japanese society and culture after World War II, claiming that Japan
was emasculated by the atomic bombs and the United States and that his
generation or younger Japanese have resorted to all things cute in order to
escape the realities of life. Elliott judges that Murakami has apparently
decided to fight the disease with the language of its infection in a homeopathic treatment for Japanese art (p. 7).
To make his point, Elliott selected artists who have produced work
that indicates a more complicated, adult view of life, melding traditional
viewpoints with perceptions of present and future in radical and sometimes
unsettling combinations (p. 7). With the provocative subtitle Between
Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art, Elliott refers to the
struggle between extremes of fantasy and nightmare, ideal and real. While
the exhibition claims to be radical, its narrow scope re-stereotypes Japanese
art as neo-traditional and overlooks the healthy multiplicity and increasing
diversification among internationally versed artists who no longer fit
comfortably within a conventional frame of Japanese art.

Fig. 1. Catalogue cover

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Although the sixteen featured artists were heralded by the Japan Society
press release as new wave, about a third of them are mid-career artists
who have worked contemporaneously with Takashi Murakami, now age
fifty, and have more or less established reputations in Japan and overseas.2
American reviews amplified this misinformation, lumping all of the artists
as Japans new breed or merely a new generation.3 Contrary to their
assumptions, paintings by Makoto Aida (b. 1965), Yamaguchi Akira
(b. 1969; he uses the Japanese order for his name) and Hisashi Tenmyouya
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earthquake in Japan on March 11, when Japan Society became one of the
first American institutions to raise funds for the relief effort, the exhibition
drew unprecedented attention from the press. It was inevitable that most
journalists reception of the show became colored through the lens of the
multiple disasters. Holland Cotter of The New York Times saw a mood
of anxiety pervading the work in the exhibition, continuing, No one,
of course, could have known that the shows images of material fragility
and decay would end up being seen in the light of real-life disaster.5
The Washington Post found a deeper portent in the aftermath of natural
disasters and ensuing unsteadiness as the world follows updates from the
Fukushima nuclear plant. The review concluded that the exhibitions rejection of Japans obsession with Pikachu and giggly Lolitas seems almost
inconsequential now.6 It is true that those disasters have already impacted
Japanese society on a fundamental level, and its art may never be the same.
In a totally unexpected manner, the superficially cheerful and cute may give
way to an era of socially committed artists, now that many are participating
in relief efforts. Still, David Elliott seems prescient when he writes that
the anxieties about the force and control of nature are matched within the
Japanese imagination by feelings of frustration, impotence, and foreboding.
In a densely urbanized, highly stratified society situated in the heart of an
earthquake zone, the fear that the worst could easily happen lies at the back
of many minds (p. 33).
Fig. 2. Makoto Aida. Ash Color
Mountains. 200910. Acrylic on canvas.
300 700 cm. Taguchi Art Collection.
Photo: Kei Miyajima, courtesy Mizuma
Art Gallery. Copyright Makoto Aida

(b. 1966) were introduced to American audiences during the controversial

American Effect exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in
2003. Aida held a solo exhibition at the Andrew Roth Gallery in New York
in 2006, and showed sculptures and photographic work in Heavy Light
at the International Center of Photography in New York in 2008.4 Another
participant in Bye Bye Kitty!!!, the photographer Miwa Yanagi (b. 1967),
who was in the same ICP exhibition as Aida, was also part of the 2006
international survey of feminist art, Global Feminisms, at the Brooklyn
Museum, had a solo exhibition at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York
in 2007, then represented Japan at the 2009 Venice Biennale.
The artists of the younger generation of Bye Bye Kitty!!!including
Manabu Ikeda (b. 1973), Tomoko Kashiki (b. 1982), Rinko Kawauchi
(b. 1972), Haruka Kojin (b. 1983), Kumi Machida (b. 1970), Kohei Nawa
(b. 1975), Motohiko Odani (b. 1972) and Tomoko Shioyasu (b. 1981)more
clearly benefited from a major group-exhibition opportunity in New York.
London-based Tomoko Yoneda (b. 1965) and Hiraki Sawa (b. 1977) and
Berlin-based Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972), on the other hand, have actively
participated in the global circuit of contemporary art. Their inclusion in
the exhibition begs the question of a nationality-bound approach.

These few issues aside, the exhibition and catalogue have done an excellent job of presenting previously lesser-known Japanese artists to an
American audience. Because it opened just one week after the catastrophic

Ash Color Mountains required of Aida the largest number of drawings ever
done in his life, and is a companion piece to Aidas controversial painting
Juicer Mixer (2001), not included in the show, which depicts numerous
naked female bodies being mixed in a gigantic blenderan homage to
the monumental 1943 painting of entwined Japanese and American dead
soldiers Final Fighting on Attu by Tsuguharu Fujita (Lonard Foujita).7 Ash
Color Mountains can be seen as a contemporary version of a war painting,

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UNPRECEDENTED PRESS ATTENTION

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No work in the exhibition fits a dark mood more than Aidas magnum
opus, his mural-size painting of ten by twenty-three feet, Ash Color
Mountains (fig. 2). Seen from ten or more feet away, it appears to be a
traditional landscape of elegantly sloped mountains in Yamato-e style.
Closer, those mountains are comprised of stacks of corpses of businessmen
buried with office detritus, such as computers, desks and plastic plants.
They immediately remind Japanese viewers of the so-called Dream Island,
the euphemistic nickname for an island in Tokyo Bay made of waste
landfill, and where a radioactive ship was moored in the late fifties. Aida
began the painting in Beijing in 2009, but could not complete it in time
for his 2010 solo show there, and was finally able to do so for this New York
exhibition. When touring the exhibition with the gallery director, Joe Earle,
weeks in advance of the exhibition, the artist told us he had added some
surprises for the viewer, such as Pixars Wall-E character and Waldo of the
popular childrens illustrated book, Wheres Waldo? series. They are hard to
findalmost inside jokes. Although the curator and American journalists
have assumed the men of Ash Color Mountains to be Japanese salarymen,
a close examination yields details such as blond hair and various skin colors
suggesting an issue broader than Japan.

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Fig. . Manabu Ikeda. History of Rise and

Fall. 2006. Pen and acrylic ink on paper,
mounted on board. 200 200 cm. Takahashi Collection. Photo: Kei Miyajima,
courtesy Mizuma Art Gallery, Copyright
Manabu Ikeda

Fig. 3. Miwa Yanagi. My Grandmothers/

HYONEE. 2007. C-print, Plexiglass. 130
100 cm. Private collection, New York.
Photo courtesy of the artist and Yoshiko
Isshiki Office. Copyright Miwa Yanagi

Fig. 4. Tomoko Kashiki. Roof Garden.

2008. Acrylic, pencil and paper on cotton, mounted on wood panel. 225 183
cm. Dai-ichi Mutual Life Insurance
Company

commenting on the recent worldwide financial crisis that was triggered by

corporate greed in the United States.
Miwa Yanagis celebrated series of photographs, My Grandmothers, countered Aidas massive painting from the opposite wall of the same room with
an intimacy and immediacy (fig. 3). The deliberate juxtaposition of Aida,
the big boy star of the all-men Showa 40-nen Kai (Group 1965), with the
big girl, Yanagi, known for her piquant feminist approach, is a credit to
the curator.8 To match the enormity of Aidas work in a true sense, however,
Yanagis Windswept Women, a series of oversized, imagined portraits of
ageless, shamanic women, shown at the 2009 Venice Biennale, would
have been a better match. Perhaps they are too large to fit in the relatively
modest size of the gallery.
My Grandmothers, begun around 2002, had already been shown in the United
States on several occasions. Yanagi interviewed, then dressed and made-up
young women as older versions of themselves placed in a theatrical tableau,
a future fantasy of old age (p. 15). In My Grandmothers/HYONHEE, a
Korean woman being fussed over by assistants reveals her status and pride
as the owner/president of a TV station.

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of Japanese beauty painting (bijinga) by such modern artists as Kaburaki

Kiyokata (18781913) and Takehisa Yumeji (18841934). Kashikis melding of
a body into the background recalls the work of American Surrealist painter
Dorothea Tanning.
Holland Cotter found Kashikis womenboth insubstantial and endangeredas part of a feminist tendency in new art, noting that half of
the sixteen artists in the show are women.9 In his lecture at Japan Society,
curator David Elliott remarked that the gender ratio happened to be fiftyfifty, and that his selection was based purely on the quality of the works.10
If he had meant to give a false impression of the Japanese art world as
having achieved a gender equality, it would have been problematic, as well
as inaccurate.

REINVENTIONS OF NIHONGA

In her exquisite paintings in the second room of the exhibition, Tomoko

Kashiki presented a series of female figures on the verge of falling or
disappearing (fig. 4). Their unnaturally elongated limbs reveal a lineage

Painting dominated the exhibition throughout the first two galleries. The
works of Yamaguchi Akira (b. 1969), Hisashi Tenmyouya (b. 1966) and
Manabu Ikeda (b. 1973)all stars of Tokyos Mizuma Galleryimpress
the viewer with impossibly intricate details, and are drawn in their own
contemporary reinventions of Nihonga, modern Japanese painting in a
traditional mode. None of them studied Nihonga, and they use oil and

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Fig. . Chiharu Shiota. Dialogue with

Absence. 2010. Painted wedding dress,
peristaltic pumps, transparent plastic
tubing, dyed water. Courtesy Galerie
Christophe Gaillard / Haunch of Venison

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acrylics, but they employ traditional formats of Japanese painting, such as

the scroll (Yamaguchi) or folding screen (Tenmyouya) and often present
hybrids of contemporary and historical subjects. Ikeda, who spends about a
year on the execution of each of his paintings, depicts numerous Lilliputian
samurais and ninjasmoving about within precariously stacked layers of
castlelike buildings (fig. 5). His meandering railways and locomotive trains
are reminiscent of the anime series Galaxy Train 999. Japan Society offered
magnifying glasses for viewers who wished to decipher these details and
wanted to make their own sense out of this sci-fi, fairy-tale narrative.

Fig. a. Kohei Nawa, in installation

view of the exhibition, his PixCell Deer
#24 (2011) in the foreground; Motohiko
Odanis SP Extra: Malformed NohMask Series Half Skeletons Twins: Tosaka
(2008); and Tomoko Shioyasus Vortex
(2011) in the background. Courtesy Japan
Society

which the double portraits of the artist are linked by a blood vein, Shiotas
work literally creates a dialogue between the dress, the human surrogate
and the virtual body in video. Although some viewers may at first find
the reference derivative, Shiotas installation partly stems from her recent
treatment for cancer.

At the turn into the third gallery, an inset rectangle opposite the interior
garden, the atmosphere changed drastically with Dialogue with Absence by
Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972) (fig. 6), a chilling installation of a white wedding
dress, connected to pumps that squirt a red, bloodlike liquid through
surgical tubing. At the 2001 Yokohama Triennale, Shiota had presented five
giant, mud-drenched dresses hung from the ceiling, being washed-down
by a shower at the top. In Dialogue, the white dress takes on a sort of
human life. The video monitor on an adjacent wall showed an unclothed
Shiota lying on the floor, breathing with surgical tubes surrounding her,
which one may see as a comment on the fragility of human existence in
the contrast between the absent physical body in the room and the virtual
presence on the screen. Reminiscent of Frida Kahlos Two Fridas (1939), in

The eeriness in Shiotas work is intensified with the deformed Noh masks
of Motohiko Odani (b. 1972) and the stuffed deer studded with glass balls
of Kohei Nawa (b. 1975), spectacularly lit in the center of the next room
(fig. 7a,b). Both works allude to a perversion or destruction of nature using
quintessential symbols of Japanese culture, the theater mask and sacred
Shinto deer, here encased in a skin of differently sized clear glass jewels. It
is hard not to be reminded of Damien Hirsts formaldehyde animals, but
Nawas point is the ever-changing membrane and the fragility of existence
rather than shock value. Although their deformity is alarming, there was
also a breathtaking beauty in this fourth gallery, realized with Tomoko
Shioyasus (b. 1981) floor-to-ceiling Vortex, a thin plasticized paper scrim
made of intricate cut-outsa traditional art techniquelit to create mesmerizing shadow whirls on the wall and floor. Approximately fifty small,
color photographs by Rinko Kawauchi (b. 1972) that are lyrical observations
of life and death in everyday vignettes offered a quiet, contemplative space,
regrettably dominated by the adjacent screen and patterns.

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OMINOUS ENERGY THROUGHOUT

Fig. 7b. Motohiko Odani. SP Extra:

Malformed Noh-Mask Series Half
Skeletons Twins: Tosaka. 2008. Wood,
natural mineral pigment, lacquer and
other media. 21.5 19.5 7 cm. Courtesy
Yamamoto Gendai

It was difficult to understand why some

of the work in the last two rooms of the
exhibition were selected. Photographs by
Tomoko Yoneda (b. 1965) of Kimsa, the
former National Military Defense Security
Command building in South Korea, are
exquisite in details and lighting, but viewers
were pressed to find an answer on their own
as to how this non-Japanese subject fit into
the context of subversion of the cute in Bye
Bye Kitty!!!. Three enormous paintings
by Kumi Machida (b. 1970), the only artist
in this exhibition who formally studied
Nihonga, not only held up the space well
with their dynamic compositions and lines,
but also radiated the unsettling energy that
permeated the majority of the exhibition
(fig. 8). Although her androgynous, robotlike child appears to be obedient to his/
her mother, the mechanical helmet might
be the actual brain of the child. It is a new,
much-welcomed development that artists
with Nihonga backgrounds are challenging the long-segregated divisions
within the Japanese art world with their own very personal approaches,
striking a major difference from the commercial route taken by their
forerunner, Takashi Murakami. She wants to sell her paintings, too, but
Murakamis art exploits otaku culture, whereas Machidas subject derives
from her personal experience and feelings.
The two videos by Hiraki Sawa, shown in the final darkened room, hardly
subverted the cute as they depicted dreamy worlds of a doll house and a
kitchen where anthropomorphized utensils were walking around. Nara
Yoshitomos (b. 1959) photograph of Hello Kitty tombstones for deceased
pets, hung at the end of the exhibition, seemed too frivolous to serve as an
epilogue to the entire show.
Unfortunately, the exhibition catalogue does not include biographical
information on the artists. Slightly reminiscent of Murakamis Little Boy
catalogue, the sociological perspective predominates in Elliotts essay Bye
Bye Kitty . . . and Tetsuya Ozakis overarching summary of the Heisei
period (1989 to the present). If they had allowed the artists to speak for
themselves, we would have more information about their artistic inspirations, processes and visions for the future. However, the exhibition still
served as an excellent entre to todays Japanese art and brought together
some outstanding worksthe majority of which have rarely been shown
outside of Japan. Bye Bye Kitty!!! was definitely a step forward in the
break from kawaii art.

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YOSHIMOTO : BYE BYE KITTY !!!

Notes
Fig. 8. Kumi Machida. Relation. 2006.
Blue and brown ink, mineral pigments
and other pigments on kumohada linen
paper. 181.5 343 cm. Courtesy BIGI
Co., Ltd.

1. For a more critical interpretation of Little

Boy, see Midori Yoshimoto, Little Boy: The
Arts of Japans Exploding Subculture at the
Japan Society, Art Asia Pacific 46 (Fall 2005).
2. This point is shared with Adrian Favell in
his review of the same exhibition in the April
2011 issue of Art in America (available online at
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/bye-bye-kitty/).
3. Jill Conner, Japans New Breed: Bye Bye
Kitty, Art in America (March 2011); and Kevin
Conley, Dark Depictions of Japan at Bye Bye
Kitty!!! Exhibit in New York, The Washington
Post (March 23, 2011).
4. For example, Aidas 2006 multi-screen
painting A Picture of an Air Raid on New York
City (War Picture Returns) was on view at the
Whitneys American Effect show from July
3 to October 12, 2003. The exhibition Heavy
Light: Recent Photography and Video from
Japan, curated by Christopher Phillips and

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Noriko Fuku, was held at ICP from May 16 to

September 7, 2008. See http://www.icp.org/museum/exhibitions/heavy-light for more details.
5. Holland Cotter, Anxiety on the Fault Line,
The New York Times (March 17, 2011).
6. Conley, Dark Depictions of Japan.
7. Makoto Aida, quoted in Mizuma Gallerys
press release for his solo exhibition Ebaka
in 2010 (available at http://mizuma-art.co.jp/
exhibition/1269584444.php).
8. For the exhibition The Group 1965 (Showa
40-Nen Kai) We are Boys! at Kunsthalle
Dsseldorf from May 21 to July 3, 2011, see the
review by Adrian Favell on Art It (http://www.
art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/Nkzn2v6rRlWAZLImcqHT/).
9. Cotter, Anxiety on the Fault Line.
10. David Elliott, lecture at Japan Society, New
York, March 22, 2011.

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