Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture is the companion catalogue to the exhibition "Little Boy" curated by artist Takashi Murakami. The book is about the aesthetics of postwar culture in Japan and marks the final project of Murakami's Superflat Trilogy started in 2000.[1]
The 298 pages hardcover book was published by Yale University in conjunction with a series of art exhibitions and music events in the Japan Society of New York in 2005. The book interprets the complex intuitive twist of postwar Japanese art while defining its high-spirited and naturally buoyant escape from human tragedy and the events of World War II. Apart from Murakami, who authored three texts and interviewed Toshio Okada and Kaichiro Morikawa, other authors are Noi Sawaragi, Midori Matsui, Alexandra Munroe, Tom Eccles, and Katy Siegel.[2]
Takashi Murakami coined the term superflat to argue for the two-dimensional sensibility and specific visual aspects of manga (comics), anime (animated television and cinema), and earlier Japanese art such as ukiyo-e, in conjunction to contemporary, "Neo-pop" artists from Japan.[3][4] He argues how the recent international boom in consumer pop media culture influenced Japanese fine art where hierarchies between high and low art, fine art and popular culture, culture and subculture, were abolished, or flattened.[5] He also acknowledges the cultural impact of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Little Boy is the code name for one of the atomic bombs) and the U.S. occupation as leading factors in the post-WWII traumas, including the infantilization of Japan as a society, which all found their way in popular culture such as manga and anime.[4][6][7][8]
Little Boy exhibition was presented at Japan Society in conjunction with the Public Art Fund between April 8 to July 24, 2005 in New York. The exhibition consisted of four public art projects that explored the phenomenon otaku, a subculture consisting of science fiction, manga and anime.[5]
Takashi Murakami, exhibition "Lineage of Eccentrics," a collaboration with Nobuo Tsuji and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2017.
↑ Murakami, Takashi, ed. (2005). Little Boy: The Art of Japan's Exploding Subculture (in English and Japanese). New York: Yale University Press & Japan Society. ISBN978-0-300-10285-7.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
↑ Murakami, Takashi (2005). "Superflat Trilogy: Greetings, You Are Alive", in Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture (in English and Japanese). New York: Yale University Press. pp.150–163. ISBN978-0-913304-57-0.
1 2 Sawaragi, Noi (2005). "On the battlefield of 'Superflat': Subculture and art in postwar Japan," in Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture (in English and Japanese). Yale University Press. pp.186–207. ISBN978-0-913304-57-0.
↑ Murakami, Takashi (2005). "Earth in My Window," in Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture (in English and Japanese). New York: Yale University Press. pp.98–149. ISBN978-0-913304-57-0.
1 2 Murakami, Takashi (2005). "Little Boy (Plates and Entries)," in Little Boy: The Art of Japan's Exploding Subculture (in English and Japanese). New York: Yale University Press. pp.1–97. ISBN978-0-913304-57-0.
Katsuhiro Otomo is a Japanese manga artist, screenwriter, animator, and film director. He is best known as the creator of Akira, in terms of both the original 1982 manga series and the 1988 animated film adaptation. He was decorated a Chevalier of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2005, promoted to Officier of the order in 2014, became the fourth manga artist ever inducted into the American Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2012, and was awarded the Purple Medal of Honor from the Japanese government in 2013. Otomo later received the Winsor McCay Award at the 41st Annie Awards in 2014 and the 2015 Grand Prix de la ville d'Angoulême, the first manga artist to receive the award. Otomo is married to Yoko Otomo. Together they have one child, a son named Shohei Otomo, who is also an artist.
The history of anime can be traced back to the start of the 20th century, with the earliest verifiable films dating from 1917. Before the advent of film, Japan already had a rich tradition of entertainment with colourful painted figures moving across the projection screen in utsushi-e (写し絵), a particular Japanese type of magic lantern show popular in the 19th century. Possibly inspired by European phantasmagoria shows, utsushi-e showmen used mechanical slides and developed lightweight wooden projectors (furo) that were handheld so that several performers could each control the motions of different projected figures.
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Superflat is a postmodern art movement, founded by the artist Takashi Murakami, which is influenced by manga and anime. However, superflat does not have an explicit definition because Takashi Murakami does not want to limit the movement, but rather leave room for it to grow and evolve over time.
Kōji Morimoto is a Japanese anime director. Some of his works include being an animator in the Akira film; shorts in Robot Carnival, Short Peace, and The Animatrix; and key animation in anime such as Kiki's Delivery Service, City Hunter, and Fist of the North Star. He is the co-founder of Studio 4°C. He has hosted the independent creative team 'phy' since 2009.
Takashi Murakami is a Japanese contemporary artist. He works in fine arts as well as commercial media and is known for blurring the line between high and low arts. His influential work draws from the aesthetic characteristics of the Japanese artistic tradition and the nature of postwar Japanese culture. He is credited for designing the album covers for Kanye West's third studio album Graduation and West and Kid Cudi’s collaborative studio album Kids See Ghosts.
Aya Takano is a Japanese painter, Superflat artist, manga artist, and science fiction essayist. Aya Takano is represented by Kaikai Kiki, the artistic production studio created in 2001 by Takashi Murakami.
Manga, in the sense of narrative multi-panel cartoons made in Japan, originated from Euro-American-style cartoons featured in late 19th-century Japanese publications. The form of manga as speech-balloon-based comics more specifically originated from translations of American comic strips in the 1920s; several early examples of such manga read left-to-right, with the longest-running pre-1945 manga being the Japanese translation of the American comic strip Bringing Up Father. The term manga first came into usage in the late 18th century, though it only came to refer to various forms of cartooning in the 1890s and did not become a common word until around 1920.
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Neo-pop is a postmodern art movement that surged in the 1980s and 1990s. It is a resurgent, evolved, and modern version of the ideas of pop art artists from the 50s, capturing some of its commercial ideas and kitsch aspects. However, unlike in pop art, Neo-pop takes inspiration from a wider amount of sources and techniques.
Hitoshi Tomizawa is a Japanese manga artist. He is best known for his sci-fi series Alien Nine.
Mr. is a Japanese contemporary artist, based in Saitama Prefecture, Japan. A former protégé of Takashi Murakami, Mr.'s work debuted in both solo and group exhibitions in 1996, and has since been seen in museum and gallery exhibitions in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Hong Kong, Seoul, Daegu, Paris, New York, Minneapolis, Chicago, Miami, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, and London.
Alexandra Munroe is an American curator, Asia scholar, and author focusing on art, culture, and institutional global strategy. She has produced over 40 exhibitions and published pioneering scholarship on modern and contemporary Asian art. She organized the first major North American retrospectives of artists Yayoi Kusama (1989), Daido Moriyama (1999), Yoko Ono (2000), Mu Xin (2001), Cai Guo-Qiang (2008), and Lee Ufan (2011), among others, and has brought such historic avant-garde movements as Gutai, Mono-ha, and Chinese conceptual art, as well as Japanese otaku culture, to international attention. Her project Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994) is recognized for initiating the field of postwar Japanese art history in North America. Recently, Munroe was lead curator of the Guggenheim’s exhibition, Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, which the New York Times named as one of 2017’s top ten exhibitions and ARTnews named as one of the decade’s top 25 most influential shows. Credited for the far-reaching impact of her exhibitions and scholarship bolstering knowledge of postwar Japanese art history in America and Japan, she received the 2017 Japan Foundation Award and the 2018 Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award, both bestowed by the government of Japan.
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Hiropon is a sculpture created in 1997 by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. Produced during Murakami's so-called "bodily fluids" period, the 7.33 ft tall statue depicts an anime-inspired figure expelling streams of breast milk from her nipples. Like its companion piece My Lonesome Cowboy, it is an example of superflat art, an art movement founded by Murakami in the 1990s to criticize Japanese consumer culture.
Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise, the 1987 debut work of Gainax written and directed by Hiroyuki Yamaga, has attracted academic analysis of its themes in various formats, including dissertations, scholarly journals, university press books, and installations.
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