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WAVE: Currents in Japanese Graphic Arts at Japan House London
We take a look at Japan House London's exhibition celebrating the art of heta-uma...
July 27, 2023
Heta-uma - meaning bad but good - was an accidental art movement. A kind of ‘anti-illustration’, it rocked conventions of realism in the Japanese arts establishment, coinciding with the economic boom of the 1980s. Emerging in the underground manga magazine GARO, and manifesting in posters and adverts, pop art and animation, heta-uma is a visual assault on the stereotypes of what makes ‘ugly’, ‘beautiful’, or skilled art.
This is the first tide of WAVE, a show that has already travelled from Tokyo to the shores of San Francisco and Sao Paolo. In London, it keeps close to the movement’s origins in commercial illustration – and is the institution’s most conventional visual arts exhibition yet. With its typical attention to detail in curation, it will no doubt reach audiences beyond Japan fans, though it sometimes perpetuates stereotypes and simplistic binaries between practices inside and outside Asia.
Parallels might be drawn with the movement’s contemporaries in other global cities, like Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York and Martin Kippenberger in Cologne. But, rather than pandering (or contextualising) with comparisons, the curation remains centred on Japan. We see artists who’ve designed for Western icons – including album covers for the likes of The Monkees and Jefferson Airplane – but more, we get commerce in reference to global brands.
Name-dropping Vogue Nippon and Nintendo, Uniqlo and Comme des Garçons, WAVE subtly highlights how Japanese artists have shaped contemporary graphic design, often without credit. These brands - some Japanese, and most global – also hint at the mainstreaming of Japanese culture since WAVE’S inception, challenging whether the word ‘subculture’ even applies.
The chaotic collages of heta-uma pioneer Yumura Teruhiko subtext the show. Working with Japanese and US comic books, he both championed and challenged American cultural themes, much like the pop-art-inspired practice of Tanaami Keiichi (and Yokoo Tadanori, conspicuously absent from this survey of contemporary art.)
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At 87, Tanaaami is about to show some of his 500 takes on Picasso’s ‘Mother and Child’ (1901), all painted over COVID lockdowns, in New York. (A welcome addition to this exhibition is the wealth of artist and curator tours and interviews, available online and in the museum space). While attentive to tradition, this is no history of Japanese art, but a thoroughly contemporary show, with 60 ‘greats’ and upcoming artists practicing today.
We indulge in the films and music which connect them. Moto Hideyasu’s works reference the nostalgic tunes of Otaki Eiichi – which still permeates contemporary films from Japan - whose album covers were designed by Nagai Hiroshi, on display nearby.
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Conventional histories of Japanese art exclude women; by focusing on the commercial and the contemporary, WAVE (proudly) features ‘female artists’ throughout (and by design, with Yoshida Mayu’s distinctive eye). It culminates with ones to watch – almost all women, and members of co-curator Hiro Sugiyama’s own Enlightenment Collective – but it opens with two pioneers.
One is ubiquitous in the popular imagination - Uno Akira, the first (to use the name) commercial illustrator in Japan. The other is lesser known by name; Yamaguchi Harumi, one member of his Tokyo Illustrators Club, and the ‘all-female advertising team’ that designed for PARCO in the 1980s.
Her flat airbrush aesthetic and ‘feminist’ depictions of cosmopolitan Harumi Girls worked perfectly for the department-store-cum-cultural-institution. With its multiple exhibition spaces, PARCO blurred the boundaries between commerce and culture. (‘This is no John Lewis,’ director Simon Wright explained on one tour, to an audience less acquainted with the Japanese titan).
Yamaguchi Harumi’s illustrations are reflections of bubble-era Japan; entwining art and economics, and ideas around gender, implicit in how women’s bodies serve as the sites of new ideas and identities. More interesting is how women illustrators are appropriating commercial media to reinterpret power hierarchies. Ichijo Hikaru’s ‘Twins’ (2021) features faceless women, liberated from the shifting tides of beauty standards, standing strong and athletic over the viewer. They wear trainers, still ready to market.
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A young woman, portrayed by Yukishita Mayu, stares boldly back at her viewer on entry. The artist merges digital media and painting in a photorealistic fashion; her signature subject shares much in common with Ninagawa Mika’s Tokyo photographs, and also manga in the enlarged eyes of its gaze.
For exhibition co-curator Takahashi Kintarō, this work embodies the ‘progression’ of Japanese art towards self-expression rather than theme. It hints at a rise in individualism, and perhaps the continued integration of Western art traditions, here sometimes applied in an anachronistic, or jarring fashion.
Artist Nakajima Yuta speaks of the ‘primitive’ medium of paint, contrasted with the developed one of film, which features throughout the final room. It disrupts the playfulness and modesty which is the undercurrent of this exhibition. Likewise, the modesty; some here call themselves rakugaki artists, meaning scribblers or doodlers, though they are at the fore in reimagining their media and working between disciplines.
Works by Tsuzuki Mayumi and Yoshioka Rina rework hand-drawn posters and advertisements from the Showa era (1926-1989) for more modern subjects. Without nostalgia, they are attentive to the ‘blood, sweat and tears that went into creating art at this time.’ (Take it literally, in the case of Tezuka Osamu’s Mighty Atom).
More traditional reference points are unavoidable. Edo-era ukiyo-e prints inform Kageyama Toru’s ‘Sharaku’ (2013) in name and style. Mischievous yōkai, the shape-shifting animals of Japanese folklore, can be found in the illustrations of Ishiguro Ayako, whilst komainu, lion-dog statues often seen in Buddhist temples, line Moriguchi Yūji’s wider works.
Trickster-ish trompe l’oeil optical effects – and David Hockney – are often highlighted here too. Enomoto Mariko is one of many to combine nihonga (Japanese-style painting) with Western European trends. At first, Yano Keiji’s blurry faces seem to lend from the tradition of morotai (haziness) – but the practice is thoroughly modern, the work inkjet printed on washi paper.
%20-%20Installation%20View.jpg)
Which is why it is so strange to see WAVE impose such strict binaries. The two-way flows between Japanese shuru/suru and Western surrealism are so visually evident, that it’s unnecessary to distinguish between Surreal Comics and Painting. Indeed, it’s more interesting to read how the curators interpret Japanese ‘superrealism’ or ultrarealism (cho-genjitsu shugi) as distinct from hyperrealism for its individual focus – when individuality is already implied as a facet of particularly Western art.
In ‘Pretend Play’ (2021), Suga Mica proposes the fox (inari) as a ‘symbol of Japaneseness’ – a rare subject in her practice, which is more inspired by the films of David Lynch. We also read of how Taniguchi Hiroki ‘considered Japan and his own ‘Japaneseness’ fundamental to his artistic expression’. But there’s little elaboration of what this means to each artist, raising interesting questions about their submissions and how they have elected to represent themselves to audiences outside of Japan.
With works spanning the illustrator-artist spectrum, WAVE implicitly challenges the divide between illustration (as commercial) and contemporary art. Whilst artists are deemed free to start from their own ideas and display them in galleries and museums, illustrators are perceived to be limited to their briefs. But, even before heta-uma, the boundaries have always been more blurred. Indeed, wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic concept of imperfection, is never mentioned, nor is the notion that perfection in graphic design might originate from elsewhere.
More recent efforts to rethink the woodblock printmaking process – to credit printers and highlight designers’ agency in interpreting commissions - underscore how art production must be considered as community. Here’s where the contemporary curation calls out for more historical context – even the name cannot avoid association with Katsushika Hokusai.
Hiro suggests that heta-uma never achieved global popularity, for there was no internet at the time. (Arguably, it only accelerated the rise of anime and manga; nor did their forefathers in woodblock print much need it).
But one look at this WAVE suggests otherwise. Indeed, many of the cartoonish animations will be familiar, if not already loved, by non-Japanese audiences; perhaps even the images they think of when they think of Japan.
WAVE: Currents in Japanese Graphic Arts is on view at Japan House London until 22 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more on WAVE, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with co-curator Hiro Sugiyama, and artists Tsuzuki Mayumi and Suga Mica, produced in collaboration with historicity Tokyo.
Heta-uma - meaning bad but good - was an accidental art movement. A kind of ‘anti-illustration’, it rocked conventions of realism in the Japanese arts establishment, coinciding with the economic boom of the 1980s. Emerging in the underground manga magazine GARO, and manifesting in posters and adverts, pop art and animation, heta-uma is a visual assault on the stereotypes of what makes ‘ugly’, ‘beautiful’, or skilled art.
This is the first tide of WAVE, a show that has already travelled from Tokyo to the shores of San Francisco and Sao Paolo. In London, it keeps close to the movement’s origins in commercial illustration – and is the institution’s most conventional visual arts exhibition yet. With its typical attention to detail in curation, it will no doubt reach audiences beyond Japan fans, though it sometimes perpetuates stereotypes and simplistic binaries between practices inside and outside Asia.
Parallels might be drawn with the movement’s contemporaries in other global cities, like Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York and Martin Kippenberger in Cologne. But, rather than pandering (or contextualising) with comparisons, the curation remains centred on Japan. We see artists who’ve designed for Western icons – including album covers for the likes of The Monkees and Jefferson Airplane – but more, we get commerce in reference to global brands.
Name-dropping Vogue Nippon and Nintendo, Uniqlo and Comme des Garçons, WAVE subtly highlights how Japanese artists have shaped contemporary graphic design, often without credit. These brands - some Japanese, and most global – also hint at the mainstreaming of Japanese culture since WAVE’S inception, challenging whether the word ‘subculture’ even applies.
The chaotic collages of heta-uma pioneer Yumura Teruhiko subtext the show. Working with Japanese and US comic books, he both championed and challenged American cultural themes, much like the pop-art-inspired practice of Tanaami Keiichi (and Yokoo Tadanori, conspicuously absent from this survey of contemporary art.)
At 87, Tanaaami is about to show some of his 500 takes on Picasso’s ‘Mother and Child’ (1901), all painted over COVID lockdowns, in New York. (A welcome addition to this exhibition is the wealth of artist and curator tours and interviews, available online and in the museum space). While attentive to tradition, this is no history of Japanese art, but a thoroughly contemporary show, with 60 ‘greats’ and upcoming artists practicing today.
We indulge in the films and music which connect them. Moto Hideyasu’s works reference the nostalgic tunes of Otaki Eiichi – which still permeates contemporary films from Japan - whose album covers were designed by Nagai Hiroshi, on display nearby.
Conventional histories of Japanese art exclude women; by focusing on the commercial and the contemporary, WAVE (proudly) features ‘female artists’ throughout (and by design, with Yoshida Mayu’s distinctive eye). It culminates with ones to watch – almost all women, and members of co-curator Hiro Sugiyama’s own Enlightenment Collective – but it opens with two pioneers.
One is ubiquitous in the popular imagination - Uno Akira, the first (to use the name) commercial illustrator in Japan. The other is lesser known by name; Yamaguchi Harumi, one member of his Tokyo Illustrators Club, and the ‘all-female advertising team’ that designed for PARCO in the 1980s.
Her flat airbrush aesthetic and ‘feminist’ depictions of cosmopolitan Harumi Girls worked perfectly for the department-store-cum-cultural-institution. With its multiple exhibition spaces, PARCO blurred the boundaries between commerce and culture. (‘This is no John Lewis,’ director Simon Wright explained on one tour, to an audience less acquainted with the Japanese titan).
Yamaguchi Harumi’s illustrations are reflections of bubble-era Japan; entwining art and economics, and ideas around gender, implicit in how women’s bodies serve as the sites of new ideas and identities. More interesting is how women illustrators are appropriating commercial media to reinterpret power hierarchies. Ichijo Hikaru’s ‘Twins’ (2021) features faceless women, liberated from the shifting tides of beauty standards, standing strong and athletic over the viewer. They wear trainers, still ready to market.
A young woman, portrayed by Yukishita Mayu, stares boldly back at her viewer on entry. The artist merges digital media and painting in a photorealistic fashion; her signature subject shares much in common with Ninagawa Mika’s Tokyo photographs, and also manga in the enlarged eyes of its gaze.
For exhibition co-curator Takahashi Kintarō, this work embodies the ‘progression’ of Japanese art towards self-expression rather than theme. It hints at a rise in individualism, and perhaps the continued integration of Western art traditions, here sometimes applied in an anachronistic, or jarring fashion.
Artist Nakajima Yuta speaks of the ‘primitive’ medium of paint, contrasted with the developed one of film, which features throughout the final room. It disrupts the playfulness and modesty which is the undercurrent of this exhibition. Likewise, the modesty; some here call themselves rakugaki artists, meaning scribblers or doodlers, though they are at the fore in reimagining their media and working between disciplines.
Works by Tsuzuki Mayumi and Yoshioka Rina rework hand-drawn posters and advertisements from the Showa era (1926-1989) for more modern subjects. Without nostalgia, they are attentive to the ‘blood, sweat and tears that went into creating art at this time.’ (Take it literally, in the case of Tezuka Osamu’s Mighty Atom).
More traditional reference points are unavoidable. Edo-era ukiyo-e prints inform Kageyama Toru’s ‘Sharaku’ (2013) in name and style. Mischievous yōkai, the shape-shifting animals of Japanese folklore, can be found in the illustrations of Ishiguro Ayako, whilst komainu, lion-dog statues often seen in Buddhist temples, line Moriguchi Yūji’s wider works.
Trickster-ish trompe l’oeil optical effects – and David Hockney – are often highlighted here too. Enomoto Mariko is one of many to combine nihonga (Japanese-style painting) with Western European trends. At first, Yano Keiji’s blurry faces seem to lend from the tradition of morotai (haziness) – but the practice is thoroughly modern, the work inkjet printed on washi paper.
Which is why it is so strange to see WAVE impose such strict binaries. The two-way flows between Japanese shuru/suru and Western surrealism are so visually evident, that it’s unnecessary to distinguish between Surreal Comics and Painting. Indeed, it’s more interesting to read how the curators interpret Japanese ‘superrealism’ or ultrarealism (cho-genjitsu shugi) as distinct from hyperrealism for its individual focus – when individuality is already implied as a facet of particularly Western art.
In ‘Pretend Play’ (2021), Suga Mica proposes the fox (inari) as a ‘symbol of Japaneseness’ – a rare subject in her practice, which is more inspired by the films of David Lynch. We also read of how Taniguchi Hiroki ‘considered Japan and his own ‘Japaneseness’ fundamental to his artistic expression’. But there’s little elaboration of what this means to each artist, raising interesting questions about their submissions and how they have elected to represent themselves to audiences outside of Japan.
With works spanning the illustrator-artist spectrum, WAVE implicitly challenges the divide between illustration (as commercial) and contemporary art. Whilst artists are deemed free to start from their own ideas and display them in galleries and museums, illustrators are perceived to be limited to their briefs. But, even before heta-uma, the boundaries have always been more blurred. Indeed, wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic concept of imperfection, is never mentioned, nor is the notion that perfection in graphic design might originate from elsewhere.
More recent efforts to rethink the woodblock printmaking process – to credit printers and highlight designers’ agency in interpreting commissions - underscore how art production must be considered as community. Here’s where the contemporary curation calls out for more historical context – even the name cannot avoid association with Katsushika Hokusai.
Hiro suggests that heta-uma never achieved global popularity, for there was no internet at the time. (Arguably, it only accelerated the rise of anime and manga; nor did their forefathers in woodblock print much need it).
But one look at this WAVE suggests otherwise. Indeed, many of the cartoonish animations will be familiar, if not already loved, by non-Japanese audiences; perhaps even the images they think of when they think of Japan.
WAVE: Currents in Japanese Graphic Arts is on view at Japan House London until 22 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more on WAVE, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with co-curator Hiro Sugiyama, and artists Tsuzuki Mayumi and Suga Mica, produced in collaboration with historicity Tokyo.
Heta-uma - meaning bad but good - was an accidental art movement. A kind of ‘anti-illustration’, it rocked conventions of realism in the Japanese arts establishment, coinciding with the economic boom of the 1980s. Emerging in the underground manga magazine GARO, and manifesting in posters and adverts, pop art and animation, heta-uma is a visual assault on the stereotypes of what makes ‘ugly’, ‘beautiful’, or skilled art.
This is the first tide of WAVE, a show that has already travelled from Tokyo to the shores of San Francisco and Sao Paolo. In London, it keeps close to the movement’s origins in commercial illustration – and is the institution’s most conventional visual arts exhibition yet. With its typical attention to detail in curation, it will no doubt reach audiences beyond Japan fans, though it sometimes perpetuates stereotypes and simplistic binaries between practices inside and outside Asia.
Parallels might be drawn with the movement’s contemporaries in other global cities, like Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York and Martin Kippenberger in Cologne. But, rather than pandering (or contextualising) with comparisons, the curation remains centred on Japan. We see artists who’ve designed for Western icons – including album covers for the likes of The Monkees and Jefferson Airplane – but more, we get commerce in reference to global brands.
Name-dropping Vogue Nippon and Nintendo, Uniqlo and Comme des Garçons, WAVE subtly highlights how Japanese artists have shaped contemporary graphic design, often without credit. These brands - some Japanese, and most global – also hint at the mainstreaming of Japanese culture since WAVE’S inception, challenging whether the word ‘subculture’ even applies.
The chaotic collages of heta-uma pioneer Yumura Teruhiko subtext the show. Working with Japanese and US comic books, he both championed and challenged American cultural themes, much like the pop-art-inspired practice of Tanaami Keiichi (and Yokoo Tadanori, conspicuously absent from this survey of contemporary art.)
At 87, Tanaaami is about to show some of his 500 takes on Picasso’s ‘Mother and Child’ (1901), all painted over COVID lockdowns, in New York. (A welcome addition to this exhibition is the wealth of artist and curator tours and interviews, available online and in the museum space). While attentive to tradition, this is no history of Japanese art, but a thoroughly contemporary show, with 60 ‘greats’ and upcoming artists practicing today.
We indulge in the films and music which connect them. Moto Hideyasu’s works reference the nostalgic tunes of Otaki Eiichi – which still permeates contemporary films from Japan - whose album covers were designed by Nagai Hiroshi, on display nearby.
Conventional histories of Japanese art exclude women; by focusing on the commercial and the contemporary, WAVE (proudly) features ‘female artists’ throughout (and by design, with Yoshida Mayu’s distinctive eye). It culminates with ones to watch – almost all women, and members of co-curator Hiro Sugiyama’s own Enlightenment Collective – but it opens with two pioneers.
One is ubiquitous in the popular imagination - Uno Akira, the first (to use the name) commercial illustrator in Japan. The other is lesser known by name; Yamaguchi Harumi, one member of his Tokyo Illustrators Club, and the ‘all-female advertising team’ that designed for PARCO in the 1980s.
Her flat airbrush aesthetic and ‘feminist’ depictions of cosmopolitan Harumi Girls worked perfectly for the department-store-cum-cultural-institution. With its multiple exhibition spaces, PARCO blurred the boundaries between commerce and culture. (‘This is no John Lewis,’ director Simon Wright explained on one tour, to an audience less acquainted with the Japanese titan).
Yamaguchi Harumi’s illustrations are reflections of bubble-era Japan; entwining art and economics, and ideas around gender, implicit in how women’s bodies serve as the sites of new ideas and identities. More interesting is how women illustrators are appropriating commercial media to reinterpret power hierarchies. Ichijo Hikaru’s ‘Twins’ (2021) features faceless women, liberated from the shifting tides of beauty standards, standing strong and athletic over the viewer. They wear trainers, still ready to market.
A young woman, portrayed by Yukishita Mayu, stares boldly back at her viewer on entry. The artist merges digital media and painting in a photorealistic fashion; her signature subject shares much in common with Ninagawa Mika’s Tokyo photographs, and also manga in the enlarged eyes of its gaze.
For exhibition co-curator Takahashi Kintarō, this work embodies the ‘progression’ of Japanese art towards self-expression rather than theme. It hints at a rise in individualism, and perhaps the continued integration of Western art traditions, here sometimes applied in an anachronistic, or jarring fashion.
Artist Nakajima Yuta speaks of the ‘primitive’ medium of paint, contrasted with the developed one of film, which features throughout the final room. It disrupts the playfulness and modesty which is the undercurrent of this exhibition. Likewise, the modesty; some here call themselves rakugaki artists, meaning scribblers or doodlers, though they are at the fore in reimagining their media and working between disciplines.
Works by Tsuzuki Mayumi and Yoshioka Rina rework hand-drawn posters and advertisements from the Showa era (1926-1989) for more modern subjects. Without nostalgia, they are attentive to the ‘blood, sweat and tears that went into creating art at this time.’ (Take it literally, in the case of Tezuka Osamu’s Mighty Atom).
More traditional reference points are unavoidable. Edo-era ukiyo-e prints inform Kageyama Toru’s ‘Sharaku’ (2013) in name and style. Mischievous yōkai, the shape-shifting animals of Japanese folklore, can be found in the illustrations of Ishiguro Ayako, whilst komainu, lion-dog statues often seen in Buddhist temples, line Moriguchi Yūji’s wider works.
Trickster-ish trompe l’oeil optical effects – and David Hockney – are often highlighted here too. Enomoto Mariko is one of many to combine nihonga (Japanese-style painting) with Western European trends. At first, Yano Keiji’s blurry faces seem to lend from the tradition of morotai (haziness) – but the practice is thoroughly modern, the work inkjet printed on washi paper.
Which is why it is so strange to see WAVE impose such strict binaries. The two-way flows between Japanese shuru/suru and Western surrealism are so visually evident, that it’s unnecessary to distinguish between Surreal Comics and Painting. Indeed, it’s more interesting to read how the curators interpret Japanese ‘superrealism’ or ultrarealism (cho-genjitsu shugi) as distinct from hyperrealism for its individual focus – when individuality is already implied as a facet of particularly Western art.
In ‘Pretend Play’ (2021), Suga Mica proposes the fox (inari) as a ‘symbol of Japaneseness’ – a rare subject in her practice, which is more inspired by the films of David Lynch. We also read of how Taniguchi Hiroki ‘considered Japan and his own ‘Japaneseness’ fundamental to his artistic expression’. But there’s little elaboration of what this means to each artist, raising interesting questions about their submissions and how they have elected to represent themselves to audiences outside of Japan.
With works spanning the illustrator-artist spectrum, WAVE implicitly challenges the divide between illustration (as commercial) and contemporary art. Whilst artists are deemed free to start from their own ideas and display them in galleries and museums, illustrators are perceived to be limited to their briefs. But, even before heta-uma, the boundaries have always been more blurred. Indeed, wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic concept of imperfection, is never mentioned, nor is the notion that perfection in graphic design might originate from elsewhere.
More recent efforts to rethink the woodblock printmaking process – to credit printers and highlight designers’ agency in interpreting commissions - underscore how art production must be considered as community. Here’s where the contemporary curation calls out for more historical context – even the name cannot avoid association with Katsushika Hokusai.
Hiro suggests that heta-uma never achieved global popularity, for there was no internet at the time. (Arguably, it only accelerated the rise of anime and manga; nor did their forefathers in woodblock print much need it).
But one look at this WAVE suggests otherwise. Indeed, many of the cartoonish animations will be familiar, if not already loved, by non-Japanese audiences; perhaps even the images they think of when they think of Japan.
WAVE: Currents in Japanese Graphic Arts is on view at Japan House London until 22 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more on WAVE, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with co-curator Hiro Sugiyama, and artists Tsuzuki Mayumi and Suga Mica, produced in collaboration with historicity Tokyo.
Heta-uma - meaning bad but good - was an accidental art movement. A kind of ‘anti-illustration’, it rocked conventions of realism in the Japanese arts establishment, coinciding with the economic boom of the 1980s. Emerging in the underground manga magazine GARO, and manifesting in posters and adverts, pop art and animation, heta-uma is a visual assault on the stereotypes of what makes ‘ugly’, ‘beautiful’, or skilled art.
This is the first tide of WAVE, a show that has already travelled from Tokyo to the shores of San Francisco and Sao Paolo. In London, it keeps close to the movement’s origins in commercial illustration – and is the institution’s most conventional visual arts exhibition yet. With its typical attention to detail in curation, it will no doubt reach audiences beyond Japan fans, though it sometimes perpetuates stereotypes and simplistic binaries between practices inside and outside Asia.
Parallels might be drawn with the movement’s contemporaries in other global cities, like Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York and Martin Kippenberger in Cologne. But, rather than pandering (or contextualising) with comparisons, the curation remains centred on Japan. We see artists who’ve designed for Western icons – including album covers for the likes of The Monkees and Jefferson Airplane – but more, we get commerce in reference to global brands.
Name-dropping Vogue Nippon and Nintendo, Uniqlo and Comme des Garçons, WAVE subtly highlights how Japanese artists have shaped contemporary graphic design, often without credit. These brands - some Japanese, and most global – also hint at the mainstreaming of Japanese culture since WAVE’S inception, challenging whether the word ‘subculture’ even applies.
The chaotic collages of heta-uma pioneer Yumura Teruhiko subtext the show. Working with Japanese and US comic books, he both championed and challenged American cultural themes, much like the pop-art-inspired practice of Tanaami Keiichi (and Yokoo Tadanori, conspicuously absent from this survey of contemporary art.)
At 87, Tanaaami is about to show some of his 500 takes on Picasso’s ‘Mother and Child’ (1901), all painted over COVID lockdowns, in New York. (A welcome addition to this exhibition is the wealth of artist and curator tours and interviews, available online and in the museum space). While attentive to tradition, this is no history of Japanese art, but a thoroughly contemporary show, with 60 ‘greats’ and upcoming artists practicing today.
We indulge in the films and music which connect them. Moto Hideyasu’s works reference the nostalgic tunes of Otaki Eiichi – which still permeates contemporary films from Japan - whose album covers were designed by Nagai Hiroshi, on display nearby.
Conventional histories of Japanese art exclude women; by focusing on the commercial and the contemporary, WAVE (proudly) features ‘female artists’ throughout (and by design, with Yoshida Mayu’s distinctive eye). It culminates with ones to watch – almost all women, and members of co-curator Hiro Sugiyama’s own Enlightenment Collective – but it opens with two pioneers.
One is ubiquitous in the popular imagination - Uno Akira, the first (to use the name) commercial illustrator in Japan. The other is lesser known by name; Yamaguchi Harumi, one member of his Tokyo Illustrators Club, and the ‘all-female advertising team’ that designed for PARCO in the 1980s.
Her flat airbrush aesthetic and ‘feminist’ depictions of cosmopolitan Harumi Girls worked perfectly for the department-store-cum-cultural-institution. With its multiple exhibition spaces, PARCO blurred the boundaries between commerce and culture. (‘This is no John Lewis,’ director Simon Wright explained on one tour, to an audience less acquainted with the Japanese titan).
Yamaguchi Harumi’s illustrations are reflections of bubble-era Japan; entwining art and economics, and ideas around gender, implicit in how women’s bodies serve as the sites of new ideas and identities. More interesting is how women illustrators are appropriating commercial media to reinterpret power hierarchies. Ichijo Hikaru’s ‘Twins’ (2021) features faceless women, liberated from the shifting tides of beauty standards, standing strong and athletic over the viewer. They wear trainers, still ready to market.
A young woman, portrayed by Yukishita Mayu, stares boldly back at her viewer on entry. The artist merges digital media and painting in a photorealistic fashion; her signature subject shares much in common with Ninagawa Mika’s Tokyo photographs, and also manga in the enlarged eyes of its gaze.
For exhibition co-curator Takahashi Kintarō, this work embodies the ‘progression’ of Japanese art towards self-expression rather than theme. It hints at a rise in individualism, and perhaps the continued integration of Western art traditions, here sometimes applied in an anachronistic, or jarring fashion.
Artist Nakajima Yuta speaks of the ‘primitive’ medium of paint, contrasted with the developed one of film, which features throughout the final room. It disrupts the playfulness and modesty which is the undercurrent of this exhibition. Likewise, the modesty; some here call themselves rakugaki artists, meaning scribblers or doodlers, though they are at the fore in reimagining their media and working between disciplines.
Works by Tsuzuki Mayumi and Yoshioka Rina rework hand-drawn posters and advertisements from the Showa era (1926-1989) for more modern subjects. Without nostalgia, they are attentive to the ‘blood, sweat and tears that went into creating art at this time.’ (Take it literally, in the case of Tezuka Osamu’s Mighty Atom).
More traditional reference points are unavoidable. Edo-era ukiyo-e prints inform Kageyama Toru’s ‘Sharaku’ (2013) in name and style. Mischievous yōkai, the shape-shifting animals of Japanese folklore, can be found in the illustrations of Ishiguro Ayako, whilst komainu, lion-dog statues often seen in Buddhist temples, line Moriguchi Yūji’s wider works.
Trickster-ish trompe l’oeil optical effects – and David Hockney – are often highlighted here too. Enomoto Mariko is one of many to combine nihonga (Japanese-style painting) with Western European trends. At first, Yano Keiji’s blurry faces seem to lend from the tradition of morotai (haziness) – but the practice is thoroughly modern, the work inkjet printed on washi paper.
Which is why it is so strange to see WAVE impose such strict binaries. The two-way flows between Japanese shuru/suru and Western surrealism are so visually evident, that it’s unnecessary to distinguish between Surreal Comics and Painting. Indeed, it’s more interesting to read how the curators interpret Japanese ‘superrealism’ or ultrarealism (cho-genjitsu shugi) as distinct from hyperrealism for its individual focus – when individuality is already implied as a facet of particularly Western art.
In ‘Pretend Play’ (2021), Suga Mica proposes the fox (inari) as a ‘symbol of Japaneseness’ – a rare subject in her practice, which is more inspired by the films of David Lynch. We also read of how Taniguchi Hiroki ‘considered Japan and his own ‘Japaneseness’ fundamental to his artistic expression’. But there’s little elaboration of what this means to each artist, raising interesting questions about their submissions and how they have elected to represent themselves to audiences outside of Japan.
With works spanning the illustrator-artist spectrum, WAVE implicitly challenges the divide between illustration (as commercial) and contemporary art. Whilst artists are deemed free to start from their own ideas and display them in galleries and museums, illustrators are perceived to be limited to their briefs. But, even before heta-uma, the boundaries have always been more blurred. Indeed, wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic concept of imperfection, is never mentioned, nor is the notion that perfection in graphic design might originate from elsewhere.
More recent efforts to rethink the woodblock printmaking process – to credit printers and highlight designers’ agency in interpreting commissions - underscore how art production must be considered as community. Here’s where the contemporary curation calls out for more historical context – even the name cannot avoid association with Katsushika Hokusai.
Hiro suggests that heta-uma never achieved global popularity, for there was no internet at the time. (Arguably, it only accelerated the rise of anime and manga; nor did their forefathers in woodblock print much need it).
But one look at this WAVE suggests otherwise. Indeed, many of the cartoonish animations will be familiar, if not already loved, by non-Japanese audiences; perhaps even the images they think of when they think of Japan.
WAVE: Currents in Japanese Graphic Arts is on view at Japan House London until 22 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more on WAVE, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with co-curator Hiro Sugiyama, and artists Tsuzuki Mayumi and Suga Mica, produced in collaboration with historicity Tokyo.
Heta-uma - meaning bad but good - was an accidental art movement. A kind of ‘anti-illustration’, it rocked conventions of realism in the Japanese arts establishment, coinciding with the economic boom of the 1980s. Emerging in the underground manga magazine GARO, and manifesting in posters and adverts, pop art and animation, heta-uma is a visual assault on the stereotypes of what makes ‘ugly’, ‘beautiful’, or skilled art.
This is the first tide of WAVE, a show that has already travelled from Tokyo to the shores of San Francisco and Sao Paolo. In London, it keeps close to the movement’s origins in commercial illustration – and is the institution’s most conventional visual arts exhibition yet. With its typical attention to detail in curation, it will no doubt reach audiences beyond Japan fans, though it sometimes perpetuates stereotypes and simplistic binaries between practices inside and outside Asia.
Parallels might be drawn with the movement’s contemporaries in other global cities, like Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York and Martin Kippenberger in Cologne. But, rather than pandering (or contextualising) with comparisons, the curation remains centred on Japan. We see artists who’ve designed for Western icons – including album covers for the likes of The Monkees and Jefferson Airplane – but more, we get commerce in reference to global brands.
Name-dropping Vogue Nippon and Nintendo, Uniqlo and Comme des Garçons, WAVE subtly highlights how Japanese artists have shaped contemporary graphic design, often without credit. These brands - some Japanese, and most global – also hint at the mainstreaming of Japanese culture since WAVE’S inception, challenging whether the word ‘subculture’ even applies.
The chaotic collages of heta-uma pioneer Yumura Teruhiko subtext the show. Working with Japanese and US comic books, he both championed and challenged American cultural themes, much like the pop-art-inspired practice of Tanaami Keiichi (and Yokoo Tadanori, conspicuously absent from this survey of contemporary art.)
At 87, Tanaaami is about to show some of his 500 takes on Picasso’s ‘Mother and Child’ (1901), all painted over COVID lockdowns, in New York. (A welcome addition to this exhibition is the wealth of artist and curator tours and interviews, available online and in the museum space). While attentive to tradition, this is no history of Japanese art, but a thoroughly contemporary show, with 60 ‘greats’ and upcoming artists practicing today.
We indulge in the films and music which connect them. Moto Hideyasu’s works reference the nostalgic tunes of Otaki Eiichi – which still permeates contemporary films from Japan - whose album covers were designed by Nagai Hiroshi, on display nearby.
Conventional histories of Japanese art exclude women; by focusing on the commercial and the contemporary, WAVE (proudly) features ‘female artists’ throughout (and by design, with Yoshida Mayu’s distinctive eye). It culminates with ones to watch – almost all women, and members of co-curator Hiro Sugiyama’s own Enlightenment Collective – but it opens with two pioneers.
One is ubiquitous in the popular imagination - Uno Akira, the first (to use the name) commercial illustrator in Japan. The other is lesser known by name; Yamaguchi Harumi, one member of his Tokyo Illustrators Club, and the ‘all-female advertising team’ that designed for PARCO in the 1980s.
Her flat airbrush aesthetic and ‘feminist’ depictions of cosmopolitan Harumi Girls worked perfectly for the department-store-cum-cultural-institution. With its multiple exhibition spaces, PARCO blurred the boundaries between commerce and culture. (‘This is no John Lewis,’ director Simon Wright explained on one tour, to an audience less acquainted with the Japanese titan).
Yamaguchi Harumi’s illustrations are reflections of bubble-era Japan; entwining art and economics, and ideas around gender, implicit in how women’s bodies serve as the sites of new ideas and identities. More interesting is how women illustrators are appropriating commercial media to reinterpret power hierarchies. Ichijo Hikaru’s ‘Twins’ (2021) features faceless women, liberated from the shifting tides of beauty standards, standing strong and athletic over the viewer. They wear trainers, still ready to market.
A young woman, portrayed by Yukishita Mayu, stares boldly back at her viewer on entry. The artist merges digital media and painting in a photorealistic fashion; her signature subject shares much in common with Ninagawa Mika’s Tokyo photographs, and also manga in the enlarged eyes of its gaze.
For exhibition co-curator Takahashi Kintarō, this work embodies the ‘progression’ of Japanese art towards self-expression rather than theme. It hints at a rise in individualism, and perhaps the continued integration of Western art traditions, here sometimes applied in an anachronistic, or jarring fashion.
Artist Nakajima Yuta speaks of the ‘primitive’ medium of paint, contrasted with the developed one of film, which features throughout the final room. It disrupts the playfulness and modesty which is the undercurrent of this exhibition. Likewise, the modesty; some here call themselves rakugaki artists, meaning scribblers or doodlers, though they are at the fore in reimagining their media and working between disciplines.
Works by Tsuzuki Mayumi and Yoshioka Rina rework hand-drawn posters and advertisements from the Showa era (1926-1989) for more modern subjects. Without nostalgia, they are attentive to the ‘blood, sweat and tears that went into creating art at this time.’ (Take it literally, in the case of Tezuka Osamu’s Mighty Atom).
More traditional reference points are unavoidable. Edo-era ukiyo-e prints inform Kageyama Toru’s ‘Sharaku’ (2013) in name and style. Mischievous yōkai, the shape-shifting animals of Japanese folklore, can be found in the illustrations of Ishiguro Ayako, whilst komainu, lion-dog statues often seen in Buddhist temples, line Moriguchi Yūji’s wider works.
Trickster-ish trompe l’oeil optical effects – and David Hockney – are often highlighted here too. Enomoto Mariko is one of many to combine nihonga (Japanese-style painting) with Western European trends. At first, Yano Keiji’s blurry faces seem to lend from the tradition of morotai (haziness) – but the practice is thoroughly modern, the work inkjet printed on washi paper.
Which is why it is so strange to see WAVE impose such strict binaries. The two-way flows between Japanese shuru/suru and Western surrealism are so visually evident, that it’s unnecessary to distinguish between Surreal Comics and Painting. Indeed, it’s more interesting to read how the curators interpret Japanese ‘superrealism’ or ultrarealism (cho-genjitsu shugi) as distinct from hyperrealism for its individual focus – when individuality is already implied as a facet of particularly Western art.
In ‘Pretend Play’ (2021), Suga Mica proposes the fox (inari) as a ‘symbol of Japaneseness’ – a rare subject in her practice, which is more inspired by the films of David Lynch. We also read of how Taniguchi Hiroki ‘considered Japan and his own ‘Japaneseness’ fundamental to his artistic expression’. But there’s little elaboration of what this means to each artist, raising interesting questions about their submissions and how they have elected to represent themselves to audiences outside of Japan.
With works spanning the illustrator-artist spectrum, WAVE implicitly challenges the divide between illustration (as commercial) and contemporary art. Whilst artists are deemed free to start from their own ideas and display them in galleries and museums, illustrators are perceived to be limited to their briefs. But, even before heta-uma, the boundaries have always been more blurred. Indeed, wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic concept of imperfection, is never mentioned, nor is the notion that perfection in graphic design might originate from elsewhere.
More recent efforts to rethink the woodblock printmaking process – to credit printers and highlight designers’ agency in interpreting commissions - underscore how art production must be considered as community. Here’s where the contemporary curation calls out for more historical context – even the name cannot avoid association with Katsushika Hokusai.
Hiro suggests that heta-uma never achieved global popularity, for there was no internet at the time. (Arguably, it only accelerated the rise of anime and manga; nor did their forefathers in woodblock print much need it).
But one look at this WAVE suggests otherwise. Indeed, many of the cartoonish animations will be familiar, if not already loved, by non-Japanese audiences; perhaps even the images they think of when they think of Japan.
WAVE: Currents in Japanese Graphic Arts is on view at Japan House London until 22 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more on WAVE, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with co-curator Hiro Sugiyama, and artists Tsuzuki Mayumi and Suga Mica, produced in collaboration with historicity Tokyo.
Heta-uma - meaning bad but good - was an accidental art movement. A kind of ‘anti-illustration’, it rocked conventions of realism in the Japanese arts establishment, coinciding with the economic boom of the 1980s. Emerging in the underground manga magazine GARO, and manifesting in posters and adverts, pop art and animation, heta-uma is a visual assault on the stereotypes of what makes ‘ugly’, ‘beautiful’, or skilled art.
This is the first tide of WAVE, a show that has already travelled from Tokyo to the shores of San Francisco and Sao Paolo. In London, it keeps close to the movement’s origins in commercial illustration – and is the institution’s most conventional visual arts exhibition yet. With its typical attention to detail in curation, it will no doubt reach audiences beyond Japan fans, though it sometimes perpetuates stereotypes and simplistic binaries between practices inside and outside Asia.
Parallels might be drawn with the movement’s contemporaries in other global cities, like Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York and Martin Kippenberger in Cologne. But, rather than pandering (or contextualising) with comparisons, the curation remains centred on Japan. We see artists who’ve designed for Western icons – including album covers for the likes of The Monkees and Jefferson Airplane – but more, we get commerce in reference to global brands.
Name-dropping Vogue Nippon and Nintendo, Uniqlo and Comme des Garçons, WAVE subtly highlights how Japanese artists have shaped contemporary graphic design, often without credit. These brands - some Japanese, and most global – also hint at the mainstreaming of Japanese culture since WAVE’S inception, challenging whether the word ‘subculture’ even applies.
The chaotic collages of heta-uma pioneer Yumura Teruhiko subtext the show. Working with Japanese and US comic books, he both championed and challenged American cultural themes, much like the pop-art-inspired practice of Tanaami Keiichi (and Yokoo Tadanori, conspicuously absent from this survey of contemporary art.)
At 87, Tanaaami is about to show some of his 500 takes on Picasso’s ‘Mother and Child’ (1901), all painted over COVID lockdowns, in New York. (A welcome addition to this exhibition is the wealth of artist and curator tours and interviews, available online and in the museum space). While attentive to tradition, this is no history of Japanese art, but a thoroughly contemporary show, with 60 ‘greats’ and upcoming artists practicing today.
We indulge in the films and music which connect them. Moto Hideyasu’s works reference the nostalgic tunes of Otaki Eiichi – which still permeates contemporary films from Japan - whose album covers were designed by Nagai Hiroshi, on display nearby.
Conventional histories of Japanese art exclude women; by focusing on the commercial and the contemporary, WAVE (proudly) features ‘female artists’ throughout (and by design, with Yoshida Mayu’s distinctive eye). It culminates with ones to watch – almost all women, and members of co-curator Hiro Sugiyama’s own Enlightenment Collective – but it opens with two pioneers.
One is ubiquitous in the popular imagination - Uno Akira, the first (to use the name) commercial illustrator in Japan. The other is lesser known by name; Yamaguchi Harumi, one member of his Tokyo Illustrators Club, and the ‘all-female advertising team’ that designed for PARCO in the 1980s.
Her flat airbrush aesthetic and ‘feminist’ depictions of cosmopolitan Harumi Girls worked perfectly for the department-store-cum-cultural-institution. With its multiple exhibition spaces, PARCO blurred the boundaries between commerce and culture. (‘This is no John Lewis,’ director Simon Wright explained on one tour, to an audience less acquainted with the Japanese titan).
Yamaguchi Harumi’s illustrations are reflections of bubble-era Japan; entwining art and economics, and ideas around gender, implicit in how women’s bodies serve as the sites of new ideas and identities. More interesting is how women illustrators are appropriating commercial media to reinterpret power hierarchies. Ichijo Hikaru’s ‘Twins’ (2021) features faceless women, liberated from the shifting tides of beauty standards, standing strong and athletic over the viewer. They wear trainers, still ready to market.
A young woman, portrayed by Yukishita Mayu, stares boldly back at her viewer on entry. The artist merges digital media and painting in a photorealistic fashion; her signature subject shares much in common with Ninagawa Mika’s Tokyo photographs, and also manga in the enlarged eyes of its gaze.
For exhibition co-curator Takahashi Kintarō, this work embodies the ‘progression’ of Japanese art towards self-expression rather than theme. It hints at a rise in individualism, and perhaps the continued integration of Western art traditions, here sometimes applied in an anachronistic, or jarring fashion.
Artist Nakajima Yuta speaks of the ‘primitive’ medium of paint, contrasted with the developed one of film, which features throughout the final room. It disrupts the playfulness and modesty which is the undercurrent of this exhibition. Likewise, the modesty; some here call themselves rakugaki artists, meaning scribblers or doodlers, though they are at the fore in reimagining their media and working between disciplines.
Works by Tsuzuki Mayumi and Yoshioka Rina rework hand-drawn posters and advertisements from the Showa era (1926-1989) for more modern subjects. Without nostalgia, they are attentive to the ‘blood, sweat and tears that went into creating art at this time.’ (Take it literally, in the case of Tezuka Osamu’s Mighty Atom).
More traditional reference points are unavoidable. Edo-era ukiyo-e prints inform Kageyama Toru’s ‘Sharaku’ (2013) in name and style. Mischievous yōkai, the shape-shifting animals of Japanese folklore, can be found in the illustrations of Ishiguro Ayako, whilst komainu, lion-dog statues often seen in Buddhist temples, line Moriguchi Yūji’s wider works.
Trickster-ish trompe l’oeil optical effects – and David Hockney – are often highlighted here too. Enomoto Mariko is one of many to combine nihonga (Japanese-style painting) with Western European trends. At first, Yano Keiji’s blurry faces seem to lend from the tradition of morotai (haziness) – but the practice is thoroughly modern, the work inkjet printed on washi paper.
Which is why it is so strange to see WAVE impose such strict binaries. The two-way flows between Japanese shuru/suru and Western surrealism are so visually evident, that it’s unnecessary to distinguish between Surreal Comics and Painting. Indeed, it’s more interesting to read how the curators interpret Japanese ‘superrealism’ or ultrarealism (cho-genjitsu shugi) as distinct from hyperrealism for its individual focus – when individuality is already implied as a facet of particularly Western art.
In ‘Pretend Play’ (2021), Suga Mica proposes the fox (inari) as a ‘symbol of Japaneseness’ – a rare subject in her practice, which is more inspired by the films of David Lynch. We also read of how Taniguchi Hiroki ‘considered Japan and his own ‘Japaneseness’ fundamental to his artistic expression’. But there’s little elaboration of what this means to each artist, raising interesting questions about their submissions and how they have elected to represent themselves to audiences outside of Japan.
With works spanning the illustrator-artist spectrum, WAVE implicitly challenges the divide between illustration (as commercial) and contemporary art. Whilst artists are deemed free to start from their own ideas and display them in galleries and museums, illustrators are perceived to be limited to their briefs. But, even before heta-uma, the boundaries have always been more blurred. Indeed, wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic concept of imperfection, is never mentioned, nor is the notion that perfection in graphic design might originate from elsewhere.
More recent efforts to rethink the woodblock printmaking process – to credit printers and highlight designers’ agency in interpreting commissions - underscore how art production must be considered as community. Here’s where the contemporary curation calls out for more historical context – even the name cannot avoid association with Katsushika Hokusai.
Hiro suggests that heta-uma never achieved global popularity, for there was no internet at the time. (Arguably, it only accelerated the rise of anime and manga; nor did their forefathers in woodblock print much need it).
But one look at this WAVE suggests otherwise. Indeed, many of the cartoonish animations will be familiar, if not already loved, by non-Japanese audiences; perhaps even the images they think of when they think of Japan.
WAVE: Currents in Japanese Graphic Arts is on view at Japan House London until 22 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more on WAVE, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with co-curator Hiro Sugiyama, and artists Tsuzuki Mayumi and Suga Mica, produced in collaboration with historicity Tokyo.
Heta-uma - meaning bad but good - was an accidental art movement. A kind of ‘anti-illustration’, it rocked conventions of realism in the Japanese arts establishment, coinciding with the economic boom of the 1980s. Emerging in the underground manga magazine GARO, and manifesting in posters and adverts, pop art and animation, heta-uma is a visual assault on the stereotypes of what makes ‘ugly’, ‘beautiful’, or skilled art.
This is the first tide of WAVE, a show that has already travelled from Tokyo to the shores of San Francisco and Sao Paolo. In London, it keeps close to the movement’s origins in commercial illustration – and is the institution’s most conventional visual arts exhibition yet. With its typical attention to detail in curation, it will no doubt reach audiences beyond Japan fans, though it sometimes perpetuates stereotypes and simplistic binaries between practices inside and outside Asia.
Parallels might be drawn with the movement’s contemporaries in other global cities, like Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York and Martin Kippenberger in Cologne. But, rather than pandering (or contextualising) with comparisons, the curation remains centred on Japan. We see artists who’ve designed for Western icons – including album covers for the likes of The Monkees and Jefferson Airplane – but more, we get commerce in reference to global brands.
Name-dropping Vogue Nippon and Nintendo, Uniqlo and Comme des Garçons, WAVE subtly highlights how Japanese artists have shaped contemporary graphic design, often without credit. These brands - some Japanese, and most global – also hint at the mainstreaming of Japanese culture since WAVE’S inception, challenging whether the word ‘subculture’ even applies.
The chaotic collages of heta-uma pioneer Yumura Teruhiko subtext the show. Working with Japanese and US comic books, he both championed and challenged American cultural themes, much like the pop-art-inspired practice of Tanaami Keiichi (and Yokoo Tadanori, conspicuously absent from this survey of contemporary art.)
At 87, Tanaaami is about to show some of his 500 takes on Picasso’s ‘Mother and Child’ (1901), all painted over COVID lockdowns, in New York. (A welcome addition to this exhibition is the wealth of artist and curator tours and interviews, available online and in the museum space). While attentive to tradition, this is no history of Japanese art, but a thoroughly contemporary show, with 60 ‘greats’ and upcoming artists practicing today.
We indulge in the films and music which connect them. Moto Hideyasu’s works reference the nostalgic tunes of Otaki Eiichi – which still permeates contemporary films from Japan - whose album covers were designed by Nagai Hiroshi, on display nearby.
Conventional histories of Japanese art exclude women; by focusing on the commercial and the contemporary, WAVE (proudly) features ‘female artists’ throughout (and by design, with Yoshida Mayu’s distinctive eye). It culminates with ones to watch – almost all women, and members of co-curator Hiro Sugiyama’s own Enlightenment Collective – but it opens with two pioneers.
One is ubiquitous in the popular imagination - Uno Akira, the first (to use the name) commercial illustrator in Japan. The other is lesser known by name; Yamaguchi Harumi, one member of his Tokyo Illustrators Club, and the ‘all-female advertising team’ that designed for PARCO in the 1980s.
Her flat airbrush aesthetic and ‘feminist’ depictions of cosmopolitan Harumi Girls worked perfectly for the department-store-cum-cultural-institution. With its multiple exhibition spaces, PARCO blurred the boundaries between commerce and culture. (‘This is no John Lewis,’ director Simon Wright explained on one tour, to an audience less acquainted with the Japanese titan).
Yamaguchi Harumi’s illustrations are reflections of bubble-era Japan; entwining art and economics, and ideas around gender, implicit in how women’s bodies serve as the sites of new ideas and identities. More interesting is how women illustrators are appropriating commercial media to reinterpret power hierarchies. Ichijo Hikaru’s ‘Twins’ (2021) features faceless women, liberated from the shifting tides of beauty standards, standing strong and athletic over the viewer. They wear trainers, still ready to market.
A young woman, portrayed by Yukishita Mayu, stares boldly back at her viewer on entry. The artist merges digital media and painting in a photorealistic fashion; her signature subject shares much in common with Ninagawa Mika’s Tokyo photographs, and also manga in the enlarged eyes of its gaze.
For exhibition co-curator Takahashi Kintarō, this work embodies the ‘progression’ of Japanese art towards self-expression rather than theme. It hints at a rise in individualism, and perhaps the continued integration of Western art traditions, here sometimes applied in an anachronistic, or jarring fashion.
Artist Nakajima Yuta speaks of the ‘primitive’ medium of paint, contrasted with the developed one of film, which features throughout the final room. It disrupts the playfulness and modesty which is the undercurrent of this exhibition. Likewise, the modesty; some here call themselves rakugaki artists, meaning scribblers or doodlers, though they are at the fore in reimagining their media and working between disciplines.
Works by Tsuzuki Mayumi and Yoshioka Rina rework hand-drawn posters and advertisements from the Showa era (1926-1989) for more modern subjects. Without nostalgia, they are attentive to the ‘blood, sweat and tears that went into creating art at this time.’ (Take it literally, in the case of Tezuka Osamu’s Mighty Atom).
More traditional reference points are unavoidable. Edo-era ukiyo-e prints inform Kageyama Toru’s ‘Sharaku’ (2013) in name and style. Mischievous yōkai, the shape-shifting animals of Japanese folklore, can be found in the illustrations of Ishiguro Ayako, whilst komainu, lion-dog statues often seen in Buddhist temples, line Moriguchi Yūji’s wider works.
Trickster-ish trompe l’oeil optical effects – and David Hockney – are often highlighted here too. Enomoto Mariko is one of many to combine nihonga (Japanese-style painting) with Western European trends. At first, Yano Keiji’s blurry faces seem to lend from the tradition of morotai (haziness) – but the practice is thoroughly modern, the work inkjet printed on washi paper.
Which is why it is so strange to see WAVE impose such strict binaries. The two-way flows between Japanese shuru/suru and Western surrealism are so visually evident, that it’s unnecessary to distinguish between Surreal Comics and Painting. Indeed, it’s more interesting to read how the curators interpret Japanese ‘superrealism’ or ultrarealism (cho-genjitsu shugi) as distinct from hyperrealism for its individual focus – when individuality is already implied as a facet of particularly Western art.
In ‘Pretend Play’ (2021), Suga Mica proposes the fox (inari) as a ‘symbol of Japaneseness’ – a rare subject in her practice, which is more inspired by the films of David Lynch. We also read of how Taniguchi Hiroki ‘considered Japan and his own ‘Japaneseness’ fundamental to his artistic expression’. But there’s little elaboration of what this means to each artist, raising interesting questions about their submissions and how they have elected to represent themselves to audiences outside of Japan.
With works spanning the illustrator-artist spectrum, WAVE implicitly challenges the divide between illustration (as commercial) and contemporary art. Whilst artists are deemed free to start from their own ideas and display them in galleries and museums, illustrators are perceived to be limited to their briefs. But, even before heta-uma, the boundaries have always been more blurred. Indeed, wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic concept of imperfection, is never mentioned, nor is the notion that perfection in graphic design might originate from elsewhere.
More recent efforts to rethink the woodblock printmaking process – to credit printers and highlight designers’ agency in interpreting commissions - underscore how art production must be considered as community. Here’s where the contemporary curation calls out for more historical context – even the name cannot avoid association with Katsushika Hokusai.
Hiro suggests that heta-uma never achieved global popularity, for there was no internet at the time. (Arguably, it only accelerated the rise of anime and manga; nor did their forefathers in woodblock print much need it).
But one look at this WAVE suggests otherwise. Indeed, many of the cartoonish animations will be familiar, if not already loved, by non-Japanese audiences; perhaps even the images they think of when they think of Japan.
WAVE: Currents in Japanese Graphic Arts is on view at Japan House London until 22 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more on WAVE, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with co-curator Hiro Sugiyama, and artists Tsuzuki Mayumi and Suga Mica, produced in collaboration with historicity Tokyo.
Heta-uma - meaning bad but good - was an accidental art movement. A kind of ‘anti-illustration’, it rocked conventions of realism in the Japanese arts establishment, coinciding with the economic boom of the 1980s. Emerging in the underground manga magazine GARO, and manifesting in posters and adverts, pop art and animation, heta-uma is a visual assault on the stereotypes of what makes ‘ugly’, ‘beautiful’, or skilled art.
This is the first tide of WAVE, a show that has already travelled from Tokyo to the shores of San Francisco and Sao Paolo. In London, it keeps close to the movement’s origins in commercial illustration – and is the institution’s most conventional visual arts exhibition yet. With its typical attention to detail in curation, it will no doubt reach audiences beyond Japan fans, though it sometimes perpetuates stereotypes and simplistic binaries between practices inside and outside Asia.
Parallels might be drawn with the movement’s contemporaries in other global cities, like Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York and Martin Kippenberger in Cologne. But, rather than pandering (or contextualising) with comparisons, the curation remains centred on Japan. We see artists who’ve designed for Western icons – including album covers for the likes of The Monkees and Jefferson Airplane – but more, we get commerce in reference to global brands.
Name-dropping Vogue Nippon and Nintendo, Uniqlo and Comme des Garçons, WAVE subtly highlights how Japanese artists have shaped contemporary graphic design, often without credit. These brands - some Japanese, and most global – also hint at the mainstreaming of Japanese culture since WAVE’S inception, challenging whether the word ‘subculture’ even applies.
The chaotic collages of heta-uma pioneer Yumura Teruhiko subtext the show. Working with Japanese and US comic books, he both championed and challenged American cultural themes, much like the pop-art-inspired practice of Tanaami Keiichi (and Yokoo Tadanori, conspicuously absent from this survey of contemporary art.)
At 87, Tanaaami is about to show some of his 500 takes on Picasso’s ‘Mother and Child’ (1901), all painted over COVID lockdowns, in New York. (A welcome addition to this exhibition is the wealth of artist and curator tours and interviews, available online and in the museum space). While attentive to tradition, this is no history of Japanese art, but a thoroughly contemporary show, with 60 ‘greats’ and upcoming artists practicing today.
We indulge in the films and music which connect them. Moto Hideyasu’s works reference the nostalgic tunes of Otaki Eiichi – which still permeates contemporary films from Japan - whose album covers were designed by Nagai Hiroshi, on display nearby.
Conventional histories of Japanese art exclude women; by focusing on the commercial and the contemporary, WAVE (proudly) features ‘female artists’ throughout (and by design, with Yoshida Mayu’s distinctive eye). It culminates with ones to watch – almost all women, and members of co-curator Hiro Sugiyama’s own Enlightenment Collective – but it opens with two pioneers.
One is ubiquitous in the popular imagination - Uno Akira, the first (to use the name) commercial illustrator in Japan. The other is lesser known by name; Yamaguchi Harumi, one member of his Tokyo Illustrators Club, and the ‘all-female advertising team’ that designed for PARCO in the 1980s.
Her flat airbrush aesthetic and ‘feminist’ depictions of cosmopolitan Harumi Girls worked perfectly for the department-store-cum-cultural-institution. With its multiple exhibition spaces, PARCO blurred the boundaries between commerce and culture. (‘This is no John Lewis,’ director Simon Wright explained on one tour, to an audience less acquainted with the Japanese titan).
Yamaguchi Harumi’s illustrations are reflections of bubble-era Japan; entwining art and economics, and ideas around gender, implicit in how women’s bodies serve as the sites of new ideas and identities. More interesting is how women illustrators are appropriating commercial media to reinterpret power hierarchies. Ichijo Hikaru’s ‘Twins’ (2021) features faceless women, liberated from the shifting tides of beauty standards, standing strong and athletic over the viewer. They wear trainers, still ready to market.
A young woman, portrayed by Yukishita Mayu, stares boldly back at her viewer on entry. The artist merges digital media and painting in a photorealistic fashion; her signature subject shares much in common with Ninagawa Mika’s Tokyo photographs, and also manga in the enlarged eyes of its gaze.
For exhibition co-curator Takahashi Kintarō, this work embodies the ‘progression’ of Japanese art towards self-expression rather than theme. It hints at a rise in individualism, and perhaps the continued integration of Western art traditions, here sometimes applied in an anachronistic, or jarring fashion.
Artist Nakajima Yuta speaks of the ‘primitive’ medium of paint, contrasted with the developed one of film, which features throughout the final room. It disrupts the playfulness and modesty which is the undercurrent of this exhibition. Likewise, the modesty; some here call themselves rakugaki artists, meaning scribblers or doodlers, though they are at the fore in reimagining their media and working between disciplines.
Works by Tsuzuki Mayumi and Yoshioka Rina rework hand-drawn posters and advertisements from the Showa era (1926-1989) for more modern subjects. Without nostalgia, they are attentive to the ‘blood, sweat and tears that went into creating art at this time.’ (Take it literally, in the case of Tezuka Osamu’s Mighty Atom).
More traditional reference points are unavoidable. Edo-era ukiyo-e prints inform Kageyama Toru’s ‘Sharaku’ (2013) in name and style. Mischievous yōkai, the shape-shifting animals of Japanese folklore, can be found in the illustrations of Ishiguro Ayako, whilst komainu, lion-dog statues often seen in Buddhist temples, line Moriguchi Yūji’s wider works.
Trickster-ish trompe l’oeil optical effects – and David Hockney – are often highlighted here too. Enomoto Mariko is one of many to combine nihonga (Japanese-style painting) with Western European trends. At first, Yano Keiji’s blurry faces seem to lend from the tradition of morotai (haziness) – but the practice is thoroughly modern, the work inkjet printed on washi paper.
Which is why it is so strange to see WAVE impose such strict binaries. The two-way flows between Japanese shuru/suru and Western surrealism are so visually evident, that it’s unnecessary to distinguish between Surreal Comics and Painting. Indeed, it’s more interesting to read how the curators interpret Japanese ‘superrealism’ or ultrarealism (cho-genjitsu shugi) as distinct from hyperrealism for its individual focus – when individuality is already implied as a facet of particularly Western art.
In ‘Pretend Play’ (2021), Suga Mica proposes the fox (inari) as a ‘symbol of Japaneseness’ – a rare subject in her practice, which is more inspired by the films of David Lynch. We also read of how Taniguchi Hiroki ‘considered Japan and his own ‘Japaneseness’ fundamental to his artistic expression’. But there’s little elaboration of what this means to each artist, raising interesting questions about their submissions and how they have elected to represent themselves to audiences outside of Japan.
With works spanning the illustrator-artist spectrum, WAVE implicitly challenges the divide between illustration (as commercial) and contemporary art. Whilst artists are deemed free to start from their own ideas and display them in galleries and museums, illustrators are perceived to be limited to their briefs. But, even before heta-uma, the boundaries have always been more blurred. Indeed, wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic concept of imperfection, is never mentioned, nor is the notion that perfection in graphic design might originate from elsewhere.
More recent efforts to rethink the woodblock printmaking process – to credit printers and highlight designers’ agency in interpreting commissions - underscore how art production must be considered as community. Here’s where the contemporary curation calls out for more historical context – even the name cannot avoid association with Katsushika Hokusai.
Hiro suggests that heta-uma never achieved global popularity, for there was no internet at the time. (Arguably, it only accelerated the rise of anime and manga; nor did their forefathers in woodblock print much need it).
But one look at this WAVE suggests otherwise. Indeed, many of the cartoonish animations will be familiar, if not already loved, by non-Japanese audiences; perhaps even the images they think of when they think of Japan.
WAVE: Currents in Japanese Graphic Arts is on view at Japan House London until 22 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more on WAVE, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with co-curator Hiro Sugiyama, and artists Tsuzuki Mayumi and Suga Mica, produced in collaboration with historicity Tokyo.
Heta-uma - meaning bad but good - was an accidental art movement. A kind of ‘anti-illustration’, it rocked conventions of realism in the Japanese arts establishment, coinciding with the economic boom of the 1980s. Emerging in the underground manga magazine GARO, and manifesting in posters and adverts, pop art and animation, heta-uma is a visual assault on the stereotypes of what makes ‘ugly’, ‘beautiful’, or skilled art.
This is the first tide of WAVE, a show that has already travelled from Tokyo to the shores of San Francisco and Sao Paolo. In London, it keeps close to the movement’s origins in commercial illustration – and is the institution’s most conventional visual arts exhibition yet. With its typical attention to detail in curation, it will no doubt reach audiences beyond Japan fans, though it sometimes perpetuates stereotypes and simplistic binaries between practices inside and outside Asia.
Parallels might be drawn with the movement’s contemporaries in other global cities, like Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York and Martin Kippenberger in Cologne. But, rather than pandering (or contextualising) with comparisons, the curation remains centred on Japan. We see artists who’ve designed for Western icons – including album covers for the likes of The Monkees and Jefferson Airplane – but more, we get commerce in reference to global brands.
Name-dropping Vogue Nippon and Nintendo, Uniqlo and Comme des Garçons, WAVE subtly highlights how Japanese artists have shaped contemporary graphic design, often without credit. These brands - some Japanese, and most global – also hint at the mainstreaming of Japanese culture since WAVE’S inception, challenging whether the word ‘subculture’ even applies.
The chaotic collages of heta-uma pioneer Yumura Teruhiko subtext the show. Working with Japanese and US comic books, he both championed and challenged American cultural themes, much like the pop-art-inspired practice of Tanaami Keiichi (and Yokoo Tadanori, conspicuously absent from this survey of contemporary art.)
At 87, Tanaaami is about to show some of his 500 takes on Picasso’s ‘Mother and Child’ (1901), all painted over COVID lockdowns, in New York. (A welcome addition to this exhibition is the wealth of artist and curator tours and interviews, available online and in the museum space). While attentive to tradition, this is no history of Japanese art, but a thoroughly contemporary show, with 60 ‘greats’ and upcoming artists practicing today.
We indulge in the films and music which connect them. Moto Hideyasu’s works reference the nostalgic tunes of Otaki Eiichi – which still permeates contemporary films from Japan - whose album covers were designed by Nagai Hiroshi, on display nearby.
Conventional histories of Japanese art exclude women; by focusing on the commercial and the contemporary, WAVE (proudly) features ‘female artists’ throughout (and by design, with Yoshida Mayu’s distinctive eye). It culminates with ones to watch – almost all women, and members of co-curator Hiro Sugiyama’s own Enlightenment Collective – but it opens with two pioneers.
One is ubiquitous in the popular imagination - Uno Akira, the first (to use the name) commercial illustrator in Japan. The other is lesser known by name; Yamaguchi Harumi, one member of his Tokyo Illustrators Club, and the ‘all-female advertising team’ that designed for PARCO in the 1980s.
Her flat airbrush aesthetic and ‘feminist’ depictions of cosmopolitan Harumi Girls worked perfectly for the department-store-cum-cultural-institution. With its multiple exhibition spaces, PARCO blurred the boundaries between commerce and culture. (‘This is no John Lewis,’ director Simon Wright explained on one tour, to an audience less acquainted with the Japanese titan).
Yamaguchi Harumi’s illustrations are reflections of bubble-era Japan; entwining art and economics, and ideas around gender, implicit in how women’s bodies serve as the sites of new ideas and identities. More interesting is how women illustrators are appropriating commercial media to reinterpret power hierarchies. Ichijo Hikaru’s ‘Twins’ (2021) features faceless women, liberated from the shifting tides of beauty standards, standing strong and athletic over the viewer. They wear trainers, still ready to market.
A young woman, portrayed by Yukishita Mayu, stares boldly back at her viewer on entry. The artist merges digital media and painting in a photorealistic fashion; her signature subject shares much in common with Ninagawa Mika’s Tokyo photographs, and also manga in the enlarged eyes of its gaze.
For exhibition co-curator Takahashi Kintarō, this work embodies the ‘progression’ of Japanese art towards self-expression rather than theme. It hints at a rise in individualism, and perhaps the continued integration of Western art traditions, here sometimes applied in an anachronistic, or jarring fashion.
Artist Nakajima Yuta speaks of the ‘primitive’ medium of paint, contrasted with the developed one of film, which features throughout the final room. It disrupts the playfulness and modesty which is the undercurrent of this exhibition. Likewise, the modesty; some here call themselves rakugaki artists, meaning scribblers or doodlers, though they are at the fore in reimagining their media and working between disciplines.
Works by Tsuzuki Mayumi and Yoshioka Rina rework hand-drawn posters and advertisements from the Showa era (1926-1989) for more modern subjects. Without nostalgia, they are attentive to the ‘blood, sweat and tears that went into creating art at this time.’ (Take it literally, in the case of Tezuka Osamu’s Mighty Atom).
More traditional reference points are unavoidable. Edo-era ukiyo-e prints inform Kageyama Toru’s ‘Sharaku’ (2013) in name and style. Mischievous yōkai, the shape-shifting animals of Japanese folklore, can be found in the illustrations of Ishiguro Ayako, whilst komainu, lion-dog statues often seen in Buddhist temples, line Moriguchi Yūji’s wider works.
Trickster-ish trompe l’oeil optical effects – and David Hockney – are often highlighted here too. Enomoto Mariko is one of many to combine nihonga (Japanese-style painting) with Western European trends. At first, Yano Keiji’s blurry faces seem to lend from the tradition of morotai (haziness) – but the practice is thoroughly modern, the work inkjet printed on washi paper.
Which is why it is so strange to see WAVE impose such strict binaries. The two-way flows between Japanese shuru/suru and Western surrealism are so visually evident, that it’s unnecessary to distinguish between Surreal Comics and Painting. Indeed, it’s more interesting to read how the curators interpret Japanese ‘superrealism’ or ultrarealism (cho-genjitsu shugi) as distinct from hyperrealism for its individual focus – when individuality is already implied as a facet of particularly Western art.
In ‘Pretend Play’ (2021), Suga Mica proposes the fox (inari) as a ‘symbol of Japaneseness’ – a rare subject in her practice, which is more inspired by the films of David Lynch. We also read of how Taniguchi Hiroki ‘considered Japan and his own ‘Japaneseness’ fundamental to his artistic expression’. But there’s little elaboration of what this means to each artist, raising interesting questions about their submissions and how they have elected to represent themselves to audiences outside of Japan.
With works spanning the illustrator-artist spectrum, WAVE implicitly challenges the divide between illustration (as commercial) and contemporary art. Whilst artists are deemed free to start from their own ideas and display them in galleries and museums, illustrators are perceived to be limited to their briefs. But, even before heta-uma, the boundaries have always been more blurred. Indeed, wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic concept of imperfection, is never mentioned, nor is the notion that perfection in graphic design might originate from elsewhere.
More recent efforts to rethink the woodblock printmaking process – to credit printers and highlight designers’ agency in interpreting commissions - underscore how art production must be considered as community. Here’s where the contemporary curation calls out for more historical context – even the name cannot avoid association with Katsushika Hokusai.
Hiro suggests that heta-uma never achieved global popularity, for there was no internet at the time. (Arguably, it only accelerated the rise of anime and manga; nor did their forefathers in woodblock print much need it).
But one look at this WAVE suggests otherwise. Indeed, many of the cartoonish animations will be familiar, if not already loved, by non-Japanese audiences; perhaps even the images they think of when they think of Japan.
WAVE: Currents in Japanese Graphic Arts is on view at Japan House London until 22 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more on WAVE, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with co-curator Hiro Sugiyama, and artists Tsuzuki Mayumi and Suga Mica, produced in collaboration with historicity Tokyo.
Heta-uma - meaning bad but good - was an accidental art movement. A kind of ‘anti-illustration’, it rocked conventions of realism in the Japanese arts establishment, coinciding with the economic boom of the 1980s. Emerging in the underground manga magazine GARO, and manifesting in posters and adverts, pop art and animation, heta-uma is a visual assault on the stereotypes of what makes ‘ugly’, ‘beautiful’, or skilled art.
This is the first tide of WAVE, a show that has already travelled from Tokyo to the shores of San Francisco and Sao Paolo. In London, it keeps close to the movement’s origins in commercial illustration – and is the institution’s most conventional visual arts exhibition yet. With its typical attention to detail in curation, it will no doubt reach audiences beyond Japan fans, though it sometimes perpetuates stereotypes and simplistic binaries between practices inside and outside Asia.
Parallels might be drawn with the movement’s contemporaries in other global cities, like Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York and Martin Kippenberger in Cologne. But, rather than pandering (or contextualising) with comparisons, the curation remains centred on Japan. We see artists who’ve designed for Western icons – including album covers for the likes of The Monkees and Jefferson Airplane – but more, we get commerce in reference to global brands.
Name-dropping Vogue Nippon and Nintendo, Uniqlo and Comme des Garçons, WAVE subtly highlights how Japanese artists have shaped contemporary graphic design, often without credit. These brands - some Japanese, and most global – also hint at the mainstreaming of Japanese culture since WAVE’S inception, challenging whether the word ‘subculture’ even applies.
The chaotic collages of heta-uma pioneer Yumura Teruhiko subtext the show. Working with Japanese and US comic books, he both championed and challenged American cultural themes, much like the pop-art-inspired practice of Tanaami Keiichi (and Yokoo Tadanori, conspicuously absent from this survey of contemporary art.)
At 87, Tanaaami is about to show some of his 500 takes on Picasso’s ‘Mother and Child’ (1901), all painted over COVID lockdowns, in New York. (A welcome addition to this exhibition is the wealth of artist and curator tours and interviews, available online and in the museum space). While attentive to tradition, this is no history of Japanese art, but a thoroughly contemporary show, with 60 ‘greats’ and upcoming artists practicing today.
We indulge in the films and music which connect them. Moto Hideyasu’s works reference the nostalgic tunes of Otaki Eiichi – which still permeates contemporary films from Japan - whose album covers were designed by Nagai Hiroshi, on display nearby.
Conventional histories of Japanese art exclude women; by focusing on the commercial and the contemporary, WAVE (proudly) features ‘female artists’ throughout (and by design, with Yoshida Mayu’s distinctive eye). It culminates with ones to watch – almost all women, and members of co-curator Hiro Sugiyama’s own Enlightenment Collective – but it opens with two pioneers.
One is ubiquitous in the popular imagination - Uno Akira, the first (to use the name) commercial illustrator in Japan. The other is lesser known by name; Yamaguchi Harumi, one member of his Tokyo Illustrators Club, and the ‘all-female advertising team’ that designed for PARCO in the 1980s.
Her flat airbrush aesthetic and ‘feminist’ depictions of cosmopolitan Harumi Girls worked perfectly for the department-store-cum-cultural-institution. With its multiple exhibition spaces, PARCO blurred the boundaries between commerce and culture. (‘This is no John Lewis,’ director Simon Wright explained on one tour, to an audience less acquainted with the Japanese titan).
Yamaguchi Harumi’s illustrations are reflections of bubble-era Japan; entwining art and economics, and ideas around gender, implicit in how women’s bodies serve as the sites of new ideas and identities. More interesting is how women illustrators are appropriating commercial media to reinterpret power hierarchies. Ichijo Hikaru’s ‘Twins’ (2021) features faceless women, liberated from the shifting tides of beauty standards, standing strong and athletic over the viewer. They wear trainers, still ready to market.
A young woman, portrayed by Yukishita Mayu, stares boldly back at her viewer on entry. The artist merges digital media and painting in a photorealistic fashion; her signature subject shares much in common with Ninagawa Mika’s Tokyo photographs, and also manga in the enlarged eyes of its gaze.
For exhibition co-curator Takahashi Kintarō, this work embodies the ‘progression’ of Japanese art towards self-expression rather than theme. It hints at a rise in individualism, and perhaps the continued integration of Western art traditions, here sometimes applied in an anachronistic, or jarring fashion.
Artist Nakajima Yuta speaks of the ‘primitive’ medium of paint, contrasted with the developed one of film, which features throughout the final room. It disrupts the playfulness and modesty which is the undercurrent of this exhibition. Likewise, the modesty; some here call themselves rakugaki artists, meaning scribblers or doodlers, though they are at the fore in reimagining their media and working between disciplines.
Works by Tsuzuki Mayumi and Yoshioka Rina rework hand-drawn posters and advertisements from the Showa era (1926-1989) for more modern subjects. Without nostalgia, they are attentive to the ‘blood, sweat and tears that went into creating art at this time.’ (Take it literally, in the case of Tezuka Osamu’s Mighty Atom).
More traditional reference points are unavoidable. Edo-era ukiyo-e prints inform Kageyama Toru’s ‘Sharaku’ (2013) in name and style. Mischievous yōkai, the shape-shifting animals of Japanese folklore, can be found in the illustrations of Ishiguro Ayako, whilst komainu, lion-dog statues often seen in Buddhist temples, line Moriguchi Yūji’s wider works.
Trickster-ish trompe l’oeil optical effects – and David Hockney – are often highlighted here too. Enomoto Mariko is one of many to combine nihonga (Japanese-style painting) with Western European trends. At first, Yano Keiji’s blurry faces seem to lend from the tradition of morotai (haziness) – but the practice is thoroughly modern, the work inkjet printed on washi paper.
Which is why it is so strange to see WAVE impose such strict binaries. The two-way flows between Japanese shuru/suru and Western surrealism are so visually evident, that it’s unnecessary to distinguish between Surreal Comics and Painting. Indeed, it’s more interesting to read how the curators interpret Japanese ‘superrealism’ or ultrarealism (cho-genjitsu shugi) as distinct from hyperrealism for its individual focus – when individuality is already implied as a facet of particularly Western art.
In ‘Pretend Play’ (2021), Suga Mica proposes the fox (inari) as a ‘symbol of Japaneseness’ – a rare subject in her practice, which is more inspired by the films of David Lynch. We also read of how Taniguchi Hiroki ‘considered Japan and his own ‘Japaneseness’ fundamental to his artistic expression’. But there’s little elaboration of what this means to each artist, raising interesting questions about their submissions and how they have elected to represent themselves to audiences outside of Japan.
With works spanning the illustrator-artist spectrum, WAVE implicitly challenges the divide between illustration (as commercial) and contemporary art. Whilst artists are deemed free to start from their own ideas and display them in galleries and museums, illustrators are perceived to be limited to their briefs. But, even before heta-uma, the boundaries have always been more blurred. Indeed, wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic concept of imperfection, is never mentioned, nor is the notion that perfection in graphic design might originate from elsewhere.
More recent efforts to rethink the woodblock printmaking process – to credit printers and highlight designers’ agency in interpreting commissions - underscore how art production must be considered as community. Here’s where the contemporary curation calls out for more historical context – even the name cannot avoid association with Katsushika Hokusai.
Hiro suggests that heta-uma never achieved global popularity, for there was no internet at the time. (Arguably, it only accelerated the rise of anime and manga; nor did their forefathers in woodblock print much need it).
But one look at this WAVE suggests otherwise. Indeed, many of the cartoonish animations will be familiar, if not already loved, by non-Japanese audiences; perhaps even the images they think of when they think of Japan.
WAVE: Currents in Japanese Graphic Arts is on view at Japan House London until 22 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more on WAVE, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with co-curator Hiro Sugiyama, and artists Tsuzuki Mayumi and Suga Mica, produced in collaboration with historicity Tokyo.
Heta-uma - meaning bad but good - was an accidental art movement. A kind of ‘anti-illustration’, it rocked conventions of realism in the Japanese arts establishment, coinciding with the economic boom of the 1980s. Emerging in the underground manga magazine GARO, and manifesting in posters and adverts, pop art and animation, heta-uma is a visual assault on the stereotypes of what makes ‘ugly’, ‘beautiful’, or skilled art.
This is the first tide of WAVE, a show that has already travelled from Tokyo to the shores of San Francisco and Sao Paolo. In London, it keeps close to the movement’s origins in commercial illustration – and is the institution’s most conventional visual arts exhibition yet. With its typical attention to detail in curation, it will no doubt reach audiences beyond Japan fans, though it sometimes perpetuates stereotypes and simplistic binaries between practices inside and outside Asia.
Parallels might be drawn with the movement’s contemporaries in other global cities, like Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York and Martin Kippenberger in Cologne. But, rather than pandering (or contextualising) with comparisons, the curation remains centred on Japan. We see artists who’ve designed for Western icons – including album covers for the likes of The Monkees and Jefferson Airplane – but more, we get commerce in reference to global brands.
Name-dropping Vogue Nippon and Nintendo, Uniqlo and Comme des Garçons, WAVE subtly highlights how Japanese artists have shaped contemporary graphic design, often without credit. These brands - some Japanese, and most global – also hint at the mainstreaming of Japanese culture since WAVE’S inception, challenging whether the word ‘subculture’ even applies.
The chaotic collages of heta-uma pioneer Yumura Teruhiko subtext the show. Working with Japanese and US comic books, he both championed and challenged American cultural themes, much like the pop-art-inspired practice of Tanaami Keiichi (and Yokoo Tadanori, conspicuously absent from this survey of contemporary art.)
At 87, Tanaaami is about to show some of his 500 takes on Picasso’s ‘Mother and Child’ (1901), all painted over COVID lockdowns, in New York. (A welcome addition to this exhibition is the wealth of artist and curator tours and interviews, available online and in the museum space). While attentive to tradition, this is no history of Japanese art, but a thoroughly contemporary show, with 60 ‘greats’ and upcoming artists practicing today.
We indulge in the films and music which connect them. Moto Hideyasu’s works reference the nostalgic tunes of Otaki Eiichi – which still permeates contemporary films from Japan - whose album covers were designed by Nagai Hiroshi, on display nearby.
Conventional histories of Japanese art exclude women; by focusing on the commercial and the contemporary, WAVE (proudly) features ‘female artists’ throughout (and by design, with Yoshida Mayu’s distinctive eye). It culminates with ones to watch – almost all women, and members of co-curator Hiro Sugiyama’s own Enlightenment Collective – but it opens with two pioneers.
One is ubiquitous in the popular imagination - Uno Akira, the first (to use the name) commercial illustrator in Japan. The other is lesser known by name; Yamaguchi Harumi, one member of his Tokyo Illustrators Club, and the ‘all-female advertising team’ that designed for PARCO in the 1980s.
Her flat airbrush aesthetic and ‘feminist’ depictions of cosmopolitan Harumi Girls worked perfectly for the department-store-cum-cultural-institution. With its multiple exhibition spaces, PARCO blurred the boundaries between commerce and culture. (‘This is no John Lewis,’ director Simon Wright explained on one tour, to an audience less acquainted with the Japanese titan).
Yamaguchi Harumi’s illustrations are reflections of bubble-era Japan; entwining art and economics, and ideas around gender, implicit in how women’s bodies serve as the sites of new ideas and identities. More interesting is how women illustrators are appropriating commercial media to reinterpret power hierarchies. Ichijo Hikaru’s ‘Twins’ (2021) features faceless women, liberated from the shifting tides of beauty standards, standing strong and athletic over the viewer. They wear trainers, still ready to market.
A young woman, portrayed by Yukishita Mayu, stares boldly back at her viewer on entry. The artist merges digital media and painting in a photorealistic fashion; her signature subject shares much in common with Ninagawa Mika’s Tokyo photographs, and also manga in the enlarged eyes of its gaze.
For exhibition co-curator Takahashi Kintarō, this work embodies the ‘progression’ of Japanese art towards self-expression rather than theme. It hints at a rise in individualism, and perhaps the continued integration of Western art traditions, here sometimes applied in an anachronistic, or jarring fashion.
Artist Nakajima Yuta speaks of the ‘primitive’ medium of paint, contrasted with the developed one of film, which features throughout the final room. It disrupts the playfulness and modesty which is the undercurrent of this exhibition. Likewise, the modesty; some here call themselves rakugaki artists, meaning scribblers or doodlers, though they are at the fore in reimagining their media and working between disciplines.
Works by Tsuzuki Mayumi and Yoshioka Rina rework hand-drawn posters and advertisements from the Showa era (1926-1989) for more modern subjects. Without nostalgia, they are attentive to the ‘blood, sweat and tears that went into creating art at this time.’ (Take it literally, in the case of Tezuka Osamu’s Mighty Atom).
More traditional reference points are unavoidable. Edo-era ukiyo-e prints inform Kageyama Toru’s ‘Sharaku’ (2013) in name and style. Mischievous yōkai, the shape-shifting animals of Japanese folklore, can be found in the illustrations of Ishiguro Ayako, whilst komainu, lion-dog statues often seen in Buddhist temples, line Moriguchi Yūji’s wider works.
Trickster-ish trompe l’oeil optical effects – and David Hockney – are often highlighted here too. Enomoto Mariko is one of many to combine nihonga (Japanese-style painting) with Western European trends. At first, Yano Keiji’s blurry faces seem to lend from the tradition of morotai (haziness) – but the practice is thoroughly modern, the work inkjet printed on washi paper.
Which is why it is so strange to see WAVE impose such strict binaries. The two-way flows between Japanese shuru/suru and Western surrealism are so visually evident, that it’s unnecessary to distinguish between Surreal Comics and Painting. Indeed, it’s more interesting to read how the curators interpret Japanese ‘superrealism’ or ultrarealism (cho-genjitsu shugi) as distinct from hyperrealism for its individual focus – when individuality is already implied as a facet of particularly Western art.
In ‘Pretend Play’ (2021), Suga Mica proposes the fox (inari) as a ‘symbol of Japaneseness’ – a rare subject in her practice, which is more inspired by the films of David Lynch. We also read of how Taniguchi Hiroki ‘considered Japan and his own ‘Japaneseness’ fundamental to his artistic expression’. But there’s little elaboration of what this means to each artist, raising interesting questions about their submissions and how they have elected to represent themselves to audiences outside of Japan.
With works spanning the illustrator-artist spectrum, WAVE implicitly challenges the divide between illustration (as commercial) and contemporary art. Whilst artists are deemed free to start from their own ideas and display them in galleries and museums, illustrators are perceived to be limited to their briefs. But, even before heta-uma, the boundaries have always been more blurred. Indeed, wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic concept of imperfection, is never mentioned, nor is the notion that perfection in graphic design might originate from elsewhere.
More recent efforts to rethink the woodblock printmaking process – to credit printers and highlight designers’ agency in interpreting commissions - underscore how art production must be considered as community. Here’s where the contemporary curation calls out for more historical context – even the name cannot avoid association with Katsushika Hokusai.
Hiro suggests that heta-uma never achieved global popularity, for there was no internet at the time. (Arguably, it only accelerated the rise of anime and manga; nor did their forefathers in woodblock print much need it).
But one look at this WAVE suggests otherwise. Indeed, many of the cartoonish animations will be familiar, if not already loved, by non-Japanese audiences; perhaps even the images they think of when they think of Japan.
WAVE: Currents in Japanese Graphic Arts is on view at Japan House London until 22 October 2023.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
For more on WAVE, listen to this episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast, with co-curator Hiro Sugiyama, and artists Tsuzuki Mayumi and Suga Mica, produced in collaboration with historicity Tokyo.
