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Loliconography

Friday, October 4, 2013

Mr. (real name: Iwamoto Masakatu, who took his alias from the nickname of a Japanese baseball player) is a so-called otaku, who paints innocent girl characters in cartoonish style with Lolita-esque sexualization. Otaku, originally a term that meant geek, has come to define a person with obsessive interests in anime, manga, sci-fi, video game and cosplay that can push the boundaries of acceptability, especially in matters of sex. Cyberpunk author William Gibson defined otaku in 1996 as "pathological-techno-fetishist with social deficit" and later as "the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur". Otaku has evolved to include a declension called 'moe' (the slant of the works at Galerie Perrotin in Hong Kong). Moe involves a predilection for fictional preadolescent girls and fetishization of a single object. For example, a fixation on broken glasses moe (girls with broken spectacles), large watery eyes moe, and military moe (cute girls in uniform brandishing guns). Surprisingly, the otaku/moe industry in Japan is driven as much by women, as men. 

Against which backdrop arrives Sweeet!, 44-year-old Mr.'s art specially created for Galerie Perrotin. Standing in the white-walled gallery observing these poster-sized glossy controversial confections of voyeurism and fetish, hurry-scurry with multiple mo(e)tifs promoting cute and kink - young girls almost like dreamy pets - it's hard to reconcile as art, and can seem like tacky grotesquerie; a gallery of pre-teen fandom stuck on a bedroom wall, the busied paint-splattered canvases like premature ejaculations or the pre-pubescent wet dreams of a sensibility that never grows up. It isn't saucy, just saucer-eyed. 


Mr. paints things he is ashamed of. He is a  'lolicon', a term derived from Vladimir Nabokov’s protagonist Humbert Humbert who bears the ‘Lolita complex’, and projects his dark, obsessive and presumably doomed desire through his moe girls. This time around, he has incorporated elements of Western art, sort of Banksy-san, with graffiti-esque patterns familiar to a wider audience. But if the subject matter shames the artist, how should the viewer feel? Do we berate the artist, how 'lo-moe' can he go, or do we just indulge the cartoon or comic Pop and some of its undeniable wit and fun, as though viewing a version of Roy Lichtenstein's splashy canvases, and ignore the parental guidance rating? 


Iwamoto is a big name in Japanese art, who matured under the even bigger shadow of Takashi Murakami. After graduating from the Department of Fine Arts, Sokei Art School in Tokyo in 1996, he became Murakami's assistant, and founding member of Murakami's Kaikai Kiki company, a Japanese equivalent of Andy Warhol's Factory in New York. Iwamoto has been associated with the Superflat art movement - which explores the emptiness of Japan's post-war consumer culture and sexual fetishism, where distinctions between high and low art dissolve at the door. 


Of the pictures Mr. fashioned for Hong Kong's Perrotin gallery, only one  so far remains unsold (right). Illustrating a form of 'Yankee street' culture (yet another otaku declension), we see a girl in black leather and a car (auto moe) behind her; its effect is positively post-coital compared to the rest, and certainly more Western driven. Which makes one switch gears and relap the gallery: Mr.'s work is not racy, but chaste, and feels ready for H&M's first artistic collaboration to drape its multi-coloured Kuteness around. 


But we're still left with a paradox: On the surface these confections are contagious, candy flossy, highly cultured Pocky-sweet pop, yet, below, like the ever-present references to planetary opposites Jupiter and Saturn in the paintings, we feel Jupiter law-abiding, honourable, and Saturn, licentious, one step away from restraint. Such explicitly vibrant work, harbours a mordant subtext; Mr.'s impossible love, a dark desire that cannot speak its name but can show its lot in supra-luminous paint. And standing four feet ten in one sock, it's worth a look.  


"Sweeet!" at Galerie Perrotin, 17/F, 50 Connaught Road, Central, Hong Kong. Tues-Sat: 11am - 8pm. Until November 9. 


Images: High School Story - Satsuki-tan & Miyabi-kyun Favorite (194cm x 162cm); and Shakotan Love: Virgin Blue (162cm x 130cm); ©2013 Mr./Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin

Admin

Loliconography

Friday, October 4, 2013

Mr. (real name: Iwamoto Masakatu, who took his alias from the nickname of a Japanese baseball player) is a so-called otaku, who paints innocent girl characters in cartoonish style with Lolita-esque sexualization. Otaku, originally a term that meant geek, has come to define a person with obsessive interests in anime, manga, sci-fi, video game and cosplay that can push the boundaries of acceptability, especially in matters of sex. Cyberpunk author William Gibson defined otaku in 1996 as "pathological-techno-fetishist with social deficit" and later as "the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur". Otaku has evolved to include a declension called 'moe' (the slant of the works at Galerie Perrotin in Hong Kong). Moe involves a predilection for fictional preadolescent girls and fetishization of a single object. For example, a fixation on broken glasses moe (girls with broken spectacles), large watery eyes moe, and military moe (cute girls in uniform brandishing guns). Surprisingly, the otaku/moe industry in Japan is driven as much by women, as men. 

Against which backdrop arrives Sweeet!, 44-year-old Mr.'s art specially created for Galerie Perrotin. Standing in the white-walled gallery observing these poster-sized glossy controversial confections of voyeurism and fetish, hurry-scurry with multiple mo(e)tifs promoting cute and kink - young girls almost like dreamy pets - it's hard to reconcile as art, and can seem like tacky grotesquerie; a gallery of pre-teen fandom stuck on a bedroom wall, the busied paint-splattered canvases like premature ejaculations or the pre-pubescent wet dreams of a sensibility that never grows up. It isn't saucy, just saucer-eyed. 


Mr. paints things he is ashamed of. He is a  'lolicon', a term derived from Vladimir Nabokov’s protagonist Humbert Humbert who bears the ‘Lolita complex’, and projects his dark, obsessive and presumably doomed desire through his moe girls. This time around, he has incorporated elements of Western art, sort of Banksy-san, with graffiti-esque patterns familiar to a wider audience. But if the subject matter shames the artist, how should the viewer feel? Do we berate the artist, how 'lo-moe' can he go, or do we just indulge the cartoon or comic Pop and some of its undeniable wit and fun, as though viewing a version of Roy Lichtenstein's splashy canvases, and ignore the parental guidance rating? 


Iwamoto is a big name in Japanese art, who matured under the even bigger shadow of Takashi Murakami. After graduating from the Department of Fine Arts, Sokei Art School in Tokyo in 1996, he became Murakami's assistant, and founding member of Murakami's Kaikai Kiki company, a Japanese equivalent of Andy Warhol's Factory in New York. Iwamoto has been associated with the Superflat art movement - which explores the emptiness of Japan's post-war consumer culture and sexual fetishism, where distinctions between high and low art dissolve at the door. 


Of the pictures Mr. fashioned for Hong Kong's Perrotin gallery, only one  so far remains unsold (right). Illustrating a form of 'Yankee street' culture (yet another otaku declension), we see a girl in black leather and a car (auto moe) behind her; its effect is positively post-coital compared to the rest, and certainly more Western driven. Which makes one switch gears and relap the gallery: Mr.'s work is not racy, but chaste, and feels ready for H&M's first artistic collaboration to drape its multi-coloured Kuteness around. 


But we're still left with a paradox: On the surface these confections are contagious, candy flossy, highly cultured Pocky-sweet pop, yet, below, like the ever-present references to planetary opposites Jupiter and Saturn in the paintings, we feel Jupiter law-abiding, honourable, and Saturn, licentious, one step away from restraint. Such explicitly vibrant work, harbours a mordant subtext; Mr.'s impossible love, a dark desire that cannot speak its name but can show its lot in supra-luminous paint. And standing four feet ten in one sock, it's worth a look.  


"Sweeet!" at Galerie Perrotin, 17/F, 50 Connaught Road, Central, Hong Kong. Tues-Sat: 11am - 8pm. Until November 9. 


Images: High School Story - Satsuki-tan & Miyabi-kyun Favorite (194cm x 162cm); and Shakotan Love: Virgin Blue (162cm x 130cm); ©2013 Mr./Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin

Admin