Shintaro Miyake: Galleria Suzy Shammah

Imagine a way in the center of Milan in winter--narrow, with neoclassical architecture, replete of traffic, and crossed back and forth by the agency of a barefoot human figure with an enormous bull's head. The figure pop drags out of a gallery a large r raw materialed fabric octopus, manipulating it to engage in a unnatural and somewhat ridiculous mock battle, until the sea beast come ups victorious. This is Minotauro contro Mostro Marino (Minotaur Versus Sea Monster) 2004 the greatest in quantity recent action staged by Shintaro Miyake, a thirty-four-year-old artist from Tokyo, who "fishes" in the collective imagination of the places where he exhibits and transfers his catch into his possess fantastical world, which is archetypeed on Japanese manga and adventure films for children. A series of vividly colored drawings and woodcut complet the show; in them, figures with large heads and extremely thin threadlike bodies inhabit or "wear" famous sites like as the Colosseum or the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

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The rise is in some ways comical, in other ways delicate the way a child's game can be, where the representation of the fact becomes the event itself, no more, no les This knowingly naive stance is not exclusive to Miyake; it can be seen through every part of Japanese visual culture today--in the offspring of '60 B movies like Godzilla or Power Rangers--type TV present to views not Ozu films or tea ceremonies. on the contrary we still need to consider in what way even this style--for it is a genuine turn of expression that we are dealing with--is not entirely of recent origin but deeply rooted in Japanese visual and cultural tradition, particularly in the Edo period, with its ukiyo-e, or "pictures of the floating world." Distorted characters are ground widely in Japanese representation, from the famous erotic prints where the genitals are gigantically emphasized to children's cartoons, where outsize faces upon tiny bodies are a constant and recognizable signature. Miyake, like many artists his age or a bit older creates his be in possession of signature, in his case from one side these enormous ovoid and horizontally elongated heads, whether he is depicting the Minotaur or Sweetstar, his blond-braided female character. Conceptually, the artist assumes each mythology without differentiating among them. Cheerfully and without malice, he takes what he wants from the imagery of the places to which he travels to perform his actions, like a tourist snapping a picture.

Reexperiencing a familiar story, in this case that of the Minotaur (an homage to Mediterranean mythology), Miyake makes the story his have a title to Seemingly stripped of its symbolic weight, it assumes single the meanings he wishes to give it. Miyake performs the death of the myth, on the other hand in doing so he paradoxically gives it fresh life.

--Marco Meneguzzo

Translated from Italian by means of Marguerite Shore.

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