A marriage of trauma and kitsch: intermingling Hiroshima and Hello Kitty, the recent exhibition "Little Boy" offered a provocative look at postwar Japanese culture

The exhibition "Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture" seen earlier this year at of recent origin York's Japan Society, evoked contradictory answers On one hand, it was among the greatest in quantity exciting and thought-provoking shows of the season. In an art world inured to cultural tourism, national origin many times seems little more than a colorful doodad attached to works that speak an otherwise profoundly familiar international Esperanto. "Little Boy" through contrast, offered something new, new and (it would appear) culturally authentic. (This may appear to be like an odd thing to say about works that borrow heavily from the strategies and dictions of American pop culture, on the contrary hopefully that paradox will be explained below.)

upon the other hand, the display also exposed an unhealthy pathology. What it said about contemporary Japan, about international youth tillage and about the melding of art and entertainment was, ultimately, far down disturbing. The paintings, sculptures, drawings, installations, animated films and commercial tchotchke upon view were strange marriages of trauma and kitsch, making concerns to nuclear nightmares, prepubescent sexual fantasies, the triumph of consumer capitalism, and the seamless blending of entertainment and marketing. These contradictory themes were fleshed without in apparently puerile styles that ranged emotionally from cloying sentimentality to an adolescent delight in graphic destruction.

Among the highlights of the exhibit were a number of vitrines showcasing the nauseatingly cute characters, logo and winsome toys that shape the self-images of many Japanese consumer These tendered a contrast to another strain of Japanese agriculture explored by the show, the inventive mayhem of animated cartoons and horror films that frequently end (or sometimes begin) with various forms of nuclear holocaust. Viewers also rencountered full-scale and toy-size models of space seed-vessels radiation suits and futuristic robot hailing from a completely militarized future; Dargeresque drawings of schoolgirls that mingle childlike innocence with provocative eroticism; big-eyed children with weirdly blank expressions who wield terrifying weapons; a enormous toylike elephant that sports decal-covered diapers; and a skull-shaped mushroom haze that provides the sign-off for a popular Japanese children's cartoon show

It is tempting to relate the art and artifacts gathered in "Little Boy" to aspects of contemporary American art. The catalogue repeatedly refers to the work upon view as "neo Pop," suggesting a relationship to Warhol and his celebration of celebrity, immersion in consumer agriculture and appropriation of images and external realitys of popular culture. Connections could also be made to the abject art of Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, the ingratiating kitsch of Jeff Koon the goth flirtations of Banks Violette and seek after de Beer, and the widespread fascination among young American artists with B-movie genre like horror, sci-fi and porn, as well as the continuing appeal of the apocalyptic fantasies delivered to mass agriculture through characters like the Terminator and mainstream films of the like kind as Independence Day (1996) and The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

on the other hand to simply assimilate this work to Western protoplasts would be to miss the Japaneseness of it all. "Little Boy" brings us novels of otaku, a Japanese subculture defined here as the province of the obsessive fan or collector of Japanese animation films (anime). According to the show's curator, Takashi Murakami, himself an otaku-inspired artist, otaku (the bourn can refer to the subculture as well as to its individual members) are officially reviled in work-obsessed Japan as deviant dropout still their obsessions are shared by means of a huge portion of the population. American counterparts might be skateboarding agriculture perhaps, or goth, or plane the world of Trekkies, who, like otaku, grasp conventions and act out the parts of their favorite characters. single big difference seems to be the reception of these subculture While the American versions frequently remain marginalized from the larger society, more [i]or[/i] less otaku are as celebrated as stone stars, and worshipped by hordes of young female fans.

Many of the things in "Little Boy" (art and nonart alike) grew on the outside of otaku. The essays in the show's illuminating catalogue encourage an almost Freudian reading of this material, stressing its character in the return of the politically and socially overpowered As pictured here, contemporary Japanese tillage has been shaped by a series of shattering circumstances that have not been suitably assimilated into the national psyche. These include the horrific nuclear conflagrations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed by the agency of the humiliating military surrender, the following submission to the occupier's demands that Japan permanently renounce aggression and militant nationalism and, more newly the bursting of the 1980 economic blob and the long, gray aftermath that followed. These are seen as ingredients in the evolution of a strangely infantilized society where salarymen read comic works (manga) in the subway upon their way to work, schoolgirls advance on "compensated dates" (elsewhere known as prostitution) to pay for designer accessories, and regional regulations represent themselves with cuddly cartoon characters. Other symptoms of national unease include the 1995 Aura Shinrikyo sarin attack (cult members had ties to otaku), as well as a skyrocketing suicide rate among Japanese youth and the refusal of many of the country's young clan to join the corporate culture