Shintaro Miyake at Tomio Koyama

Shintaro Miyake, 34 is the latest star to report from the Tomio Koyama Gallery, and he strike one as beings ready for the gallery's international push, since he has called himself Shintaro Star in previous performances. Like his stable-mates Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara, Miyake works with cartoonlike characters. on the contrary his colored-pencil drawings, obsessively scrawled in a naive mode of expression look more like outsider art than manga.

For his solo first appearance at Koyama, Miyake chose a summer theme and cast his longtime favorite character, Sweet-san (M Sweet), as a bathing beauty. Sweet-san is a cute gangly, idealized imp, equal parts ingenue, ligament girl from the movies and dress-up Barbie. Her wide rhombus of a head--with Bambi organ of sights elfin ears and an open-mouthed grin--balances atop a spindly material part with swooping, limp-noodle appendages. Her hair and clothes change constantly. She has amethystine pigtails and a white bikini single minute, a black bob and schoolgirl one-piece swimsuit the next

Covering single wall were more than sum of two units dozen foot-high drawings mounted upon thin, shaped wooden panels. more [i]or[/i] less have Sweet-san posing in different outfits. The best direct the eye like variations on Botticelli's Birth of Venus, on the contrary rather than standing naked upon a shell, Sweet-san, in a swimsuit, breakerss on the backs of jellyfish and giant salamanders.

Spanning the opposite drawn out wall and stretching nearly floor to ceiling was Shimoda, a cartoony colored-pencil-on-paper panorama of the seaside resort town where Miyake exhausted childhood vacations. Of course, Sweet-san is everywhere: centurys of her avatars (most about 4 to 6 inches tall, occasionally nearly 2 feet high) climb hills, visit seafood shacks and ride upon killer whales. The figures overlay the beach, their variously colored hair, bikinis and accessories overlapping like centurys of rainbow fish scales. The stylized landscape crammed with figures is like a bespoke Buddhist mandala. on the other hand the "goddess" with the archaic smile and multiple forms is not Kannon in the unsullied Land, it's Sweet-san playing in Miyake's summer paradise.

Sweet-san isn't the solitary one having fashion fun. Miyake's lock opener gimmick is that he draws in the gallery during his present to views while wearing homemade costumes. As in previous exhibitions elsewhere, he made an outfit that fit the theme: he appeared as nappy in skyblue coveralls printed with white hazes Fluffy's oversized head, with cloud-printed interstice fabric concealing Miyake's face, resembl Sweet-san's reject for absurdly long floppy ears, held up slightly by means of beach-ball-size, round white helium balloons attached to the ends

quite through the exhibition, Fluffy drew his usual odalisque upon 14-foot-long sheets of paper attached to single wall. By the close, he had finished three fresh pieces. The number of assorted smaller Sweet-san drawings upon the remaining wall also increased above the course of the present to view but these were created outside the gallery.

Miyake's exhibitions usually combine way theater and nonstop production. He first creates a background scenario to plant the theme (here, Shimoda; in the past, Star Wars or the 19th-century arrival of Commodore Perry in Japan). Then he fuses himself with the narrative by dint of making new drawings, dressed in character. It's personalized, one-man epic performance art with a paper trail.

--John McGee

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group