Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
That’s Deth P Sun and Marci Washington
Rob Sato and family. That’s Ako Castuera in gold
That’s Mr and Mrs Choe!
Here’s photo set 1. I’ll get to writing later on. This set is by Dean Gojobori who helped throughout the exhibition. People enter Albert Reyes “maze” downstairs.
That’s my introducing Rob Sato and Ako Castuera.
The Queens Court. Thanks for coming through.
It’s October and most of Asia is gearing up for the Moon Festival. To celebrate the holiday, ultra-nationlists are kicking off the season the only way they can: with Anti-Japanese moon cakes. Stamped across are the phrases: “Kill Japanese,” “Eat Japanese,” “Kick out Japanese,” and “Hate Japanese.” What’s with all the hostility? The two countries have unsettled territorial disputes over rocks–I mean–islands called Senkaku or Diaoyu depending on where you stand on the issue. It’s reopening old wounds from the past from Japan’s colonization of the country. Tensions boiled over when the Japanese Government nationalized their purchase of the islands. Demonstrations, riots, and protests raged across the Middle Kingdom. People driving Japanese cars were yanked from their vehicles and beaten by irate pedestrians. Protestors damaged shops and stores for Japanese brands and went so far as to deface a Samsung store without realizing that the company was South Korean. That scraps the azuki-filled surface of the backstory behind those cakes. One question though, is the “Little Japan” Chinese characters up above some sort of derogatory term that I don’t know about?
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The banner is getting installed, but after finding a few snags in the print out, it’s all getting redone. Damn. So close, but not close enough. It’s a good looking wall.
Eishi Takaoka sculpture. The light was dim, so the photo is too.
Lynn Yamasaki… she made GR Jello. Those are Big Boss Robots in there. Seriously great and they taste great too.
I have a confession to make. I’m new to Japan’s pop-art scene. I haven’t fully grasped Takashi Murakami’s the theoretical frame work of his Postmodern Superflat movement, but I’m an avid fan of his work and everything and everyone associated with it. Yoshitomo Nara sometimes comes up on the topic of Murakami and Superflat. The last time Nara’s solo exhibit occupied the Yokohama Museum of Art’s halls in 2001, it coincidentally coincided with Murakami’s at the Museum of Contemporary of Art, Tokyo. Eleven years later, Nara has returned with his next exhibit “a bit like you and me…” It was possibility the first time that I not only had to wait in line for admittance for an art exhibit, but also the one time where I had to follow a queue of people to move from piece to piece. Amidst all this, I immediately understood the hype. There’s something oddly bewitching about his characters and painting. Their eyes are deformed, reminiscent of the anime and manga characters’ that he consumed early on in the 1960s. Cute though his characters may be, their expressions are anything but that. Each of his pieces portrays nearly identical girls with leers that have grown to become his signature aesthetic. A gallery of bronze cast sculptures occupy one floor and as Edan Corkill of the Japan Times reports, March 11 became the key piece to its conception. The sculptures aren’t socially or politically active so much as they’re emotionally wrought. What’s more, there feels like a touch of growing maturity to his newer paintings. Take Ms. Spring for example. I’m not sure to what degree Nara is influenced by contemporary anime, but the multi-colored scheme reminds me of some of the digital effects rendered by photoshopped characters. The main difference is that while artists use Adobe Elements to achieve this effect, Nara took acrylic to canvas. Look deeper into the eyes of “Ms. Spring” and there’s a vividness in its color that defies her otherwise sullen mood. There’s certainly sorrow there, but the complex coloring of it all is almost elevating. What this means about the direction of Japan’s nascent Post-3.11 art movement is anyone’s best bet, but this exhibit may be one of the best places to start. Yoshitomo Nara’s exhibit, “a bit like you and me…” continues until Sunday, September 23rd, 2012 at the Yokohama Museum of Art. For further information, visit www.nara2012-13.org.
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