Superflat

This article explores the cultural association of modality in relation to Japanese art. It identifies the modality configurations between a set of Superflat images by Takashi Murakami and a set of Edo era images by three seventeenth and eighteenth century painters. The analytical framework employed in this study is Kress and van Leeuwen’s concept of the modality of images, which was developed in their book Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2006 [1996]). A focus on modality allows for a bottom-up investigation of the key aesthetic elements that act as a visual foundation for the images. The research reveals aesthetic similarities between the two sets of images and shows potential for creating historical and cultural associations with an artist’s determined manipulation of certain modality features within images.

This essay looks at Kusama's re-immersion in Japan in the 1970s when a mass culture of cuteness was developing there, the impact of "kawaii" on her work, and Kusama's subsequent role in the shaping of the culture that formed the "Superflat" generation.  It also considers the reason for the Modernist difficulty with notions of "cuteness."

This paper was submitted as the final paper for a Cultural Production module at National University of Singapore.

In this paper, I explore the politics of cultural appropriation and representation through the globalised commodity of K-Pop, particularly through the music videos of YG Family. Polemic arguments regarding cultural appropriation as either negative (racist) or positive (appreciation) are problematic. Such discourse perceives cultural exchange as a simplistic, copy-and-paste process; rather than a complex process influenced by multiple factors.  Drawing upon Bourdieu, ’the artistic field is not reducible to a population linked by simple relations of interactions’ .The politics of depoliticizing race has to be engaged within the field of K-Pop cultural production, where artists negotiate between contradictory desires for artistic creativity and mainstream success. YG Family’s foray into “global” hip-hop culture means performing “black”ness cross-culturally and within the capitalist cultural industry. This essay hopes to contextualise K-pop as a strategic cultural commodity, and not just a cultural hybrid of pre-existing Western and Eastern forms.

on a computer and turned into a chromogenic print for display. It measures 30 inches high and 118⅛ inches long. The work itself is divided into three parts. Starting from the right, we have an urban scene featuring a woman who has crashed her bicycle and spilled the noodles she was delivering. Amusingly the noodles are on her "noodle," though it is questionable whether that American idiom translates into Japanese. This section is separated by a curving line created by the wall of the graveyard. This division is bridged by three spirits who comment on the woman in the accident. Their words regarding her not being dead, but weakening, seem to allude to more than just the bicycle accident ( ).

Howl’s Moving Castle is enjoyed as a classic fantasy for children, both in the form of Diana Wynne Jones's 1986 novel and as Japan’s top-grossing film of 2004 directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Each text is structured as an immersive fantasy, a type of narrative that “invites us to share not merely a world but a set of assumptions." The jump from page to screen, however, effects major changes in how meaning is presented and how it is assimilated by the audience. While Jones’s novel deconstructs multiple layers of reality to unlock a postmodern puzzle, Miyazaki’s film establishes a “what you see is what you get” visual reality that conforms to the postmodern aesthetic of the Superflat movement in Japanese art.

While Jones’ novel presents an archetypally traditional Western status hierarchy to help her readers move towards liberation from expectations and a critical awakening, Miyazaki’s film navigates an apocalyptic Superflat present overshadowed by Japan’s recent past to urge his audience towards a more positive future.

This essay looks at Kusama's re-immersion in Japan in the 1970s, the impact of the  "Kawaii," phenomenon, the mass culture of cuteness of the 1980s and 90s, on her work, and the qualities she shares with the "Superflat" generation that emerged in the 1990s. It also suggests reasons why cuteness has been anathema to modernist values.

In the age of the “transmediagesamtkunstwerk” – that is, a “total work of art” in which we no longer have one single work that concentrates a variety of media, but rather a work that finds expression through multiple media –  the concept of kyara has become a key aesthetic strategy within Japanese popular culture (manga, anime, computer games, novels, pop music). I will address its relationship with the “total work of art” in three steps: the kyara-moé (consumption of characters) as a binding element in multimedia projects; merchandise as commoditization of the idea of "total building"; and fan labor (derivative work created by fans) as hypothetical 12th art, seeking a redefinition of "totality” in the context of late modernity. I will briefly discuss some case studies from Japanese popular culture and contemporary art: the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise and works by artists associated with the Superflat movement, namely, Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara.

Howl’s Moving Castle is enjoyed as a classic fantasy for children, both in the form of Diana Wynne Jones's 1986 novel and as Japan’s top-grossing film of 2004 directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Each text is structured as an immersive fantasy, a type of narrative that “invites us to share not merely a world but a set of assumptions." The jump from page to screen, however, effects major changes in how meaning is presented and how it is assimilated by the audience. While Jones’s novel deconstructs multiple layers of reality to unlock a postmodern puzzle, Miyazaki’s film establishes a “what you see is what you get” visual reality that conforms to the postmodern aesthetic of the Superflat movement in Japanese art.

While Jones’ novel presents an archetypally traditional Western status hierarchy to help her readers move towards liberation from expectations and a critical awakening, Miyazaki’s film navigates an apocalyptic Superflat present overshadowed by Japan’s recent past to urge his audience towards a more positive future.

My research focuses on the changes in the Super Flat discourse, the artistic project
created by contemporary artist Murakami Takashi at the end of the 1990’s. It spans a period of about twenty years, organized in three chronological phases. The first phase corresponds to the conception of the discourse and the project, together with the context within which it is carried out in Japan. The second phase corresponds to the exportation of Super Flat. And finally, the third phase is the return to Japan in the last ten years, and its consequences. This way I analyze the transformations of Super Flat and its relation to the construction of a Japanese identity through contemporary art and its international commercialization.

O  presente  estudo  tem  como  objetivo  apresentar  a  expansão  e  a  cultura/estética,  em diferentes  nichos  sociais,  do  "kawaii"
que  é  um  adjetivo  usado  na  língua  japonesa.  Ele  é geralmente traduzido para o português como fofo e gracioso, mas não se limita a esta única tradução pelo seu conceito etimológico complexo. Além disso, desde a perspectiva histórica-política-social, destacam-se no
kawaii  as abordagens políticas e filosóficas nas sociedades não
somente a Japão, porém em outras por ser conhecida principalmente pelos mangás, animes e games;  inclusive  no  Brasil.  No  campo  das  artes  visuais, "kawaii"  foi  uma  das  bases  para  a criação  do  movimento  artístico  "superflat",  inicialmente  conceituado  pelo  artista  Takashi Murakami (1962) em 2001. Além disso, no período de pós Segunda Guerra Mundial, o Japão se tornou uma potência econômica e utilizou desta estética doce como ferramenta expansiva
no mercado global, principalmente por meio dos quadrinhos, animações e venda de artigos em setores  diversos.  Ao  aproximar  esta  cultura/estética  com  o  mundo  ocidental,  há  o  uso  do conceito eurocêntrico "kistch"  junto de um trabalho fotográfico em lojas de diversos segmentos que  tinham  produtos  com  o  conceito 
kawaii,  presente  no  cotidiano  do  cidadão  comum brasileiro.  Foram  realizadas  também  entrevistas  com  diferentes  artistas  nacionais,  cujas produções se associam ao tema abordado desta pesquisa.

This paper aims to explore the spectacular forms of life in the digital environments and their ontological dimensions, by calling such conditions as ‘an ethics of flatness.’ What follows is an in-depth analysis of the Japanese experimental art collective known as teamLab (2001-current), which can be subdivided into three stages. The first is a survey of teamLab’s art historical contexts. teamLab represents a generation that has undergone a series of events which include the economic rise and downfall of the postwar Japan, and natural/social disasters such as earthquakes and the subway gas attack in the 1990s. Second, by analyzing the select works of teamLab made in the last ten years, this paper claims that their work prompts an unstable sense of community. Third, this paper proposes a theoretical framework with which to explore a world of flatness without being subjugated by its negative connotations. Bringing forth such a framework accompanies the following set of discourses: the concept of body raised by Baruch Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze, a new materialist approach to the world of experience by John Frow and Yuk Hui, and theories of the spectacle raised by Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Luc Nancy that read the Debordian idea against the grain.

Ère Heisei (1989-2019) : bilan de la création artistique contemporaine japonaise dimanche 12 mai 2019, par Amandine Davre L'abdication au trône de l'Empereur Akihito, le 30 avril 2019, met officiellement fin à l'Ère Heisei qui avait débuté le 8 janvier 1989. Marquée par plusieurs grands événements -crise économique, attentats, désastres naturels et humains -, l'ère Heisei a été confrontée à plusieurs défis. Tous ont influencé la création artistique japonaise, de près ou de loin. La fin d'Heisei marque ainsi le temps des bilans. Revenons sur trente années qui ont marqué le développement de l'art contemporain japonais.

Why is it that Superflat, Japan’s iconic contemporary art movement known for its close association with the internet-driven, multimedia-sensitive and post-human-friendly subculture of otaku (a modern Japanese slang word roughly equivalent to “geek” or "nerd"), has proven to be so relentlessly preoccupied with the seemingly anachronistic medium of painting?
Though most Japanese contemporary authors are better filed under the umbrella term of “visual artist,” many have thoughtfully explored painting and painting-related grammar(s). Some, like Mariko Mori and Chiho Aoshima, address the history and traditions of painting by means of digital and photographic technologies; others, such as Takashi Murakami, Makoto Aida and Mr., engage with computer graphics imagery and rendering processes via “old school” paint-on-canvas, drawing on western and eastern techniques and materials. This crossbred, “updated” pictorial surface has shaped a “post-painterly figuration,” seeking meaning-making in the clearness of shapes and outlines of vector illustration, gradients and cell shading, and screen-like flatness.
Superflat also tackles head-on with the issue of painting’s own status as a market-friendly practice, whose production of transactional material objects is often perceived as compromising any claims to avant-garde. Here, Superflat has the home-field advantage: emerging from the so-called Art Mecho, a word play used to describe the “visual and narrative forms that extended from Japanese anime and manga” (1) – long since one of Japan’s most effervescent, cutting-edge and grassroots cultural industries –, it embraces “not the inertia of the commodity-object but the stirrings of a commodity-life” (2), constantly employing painting to tease the boundaries between specialist and amateur, reception and production, original and derivative.
Finally, it is no accident that Murakami’s Superflat Manifesto starts off by boldly stating that “the world of the future might be like Japan is today – superflat” (3). If "at bottom, the specter is the future… it presents itself only as that which could come, or come back" (4), then Superflat’s fascination with painting may very well come to this: the hauntological mystery of painting as spectral return, its inner logics of phantasm and fetish, so close to Japan’s own identitary anxieties in late modernity.


(1) Frenchy Lunning, “Introduction,” Mechademia 5 (2010): ix.
(2) Thomas Lamarre, “Introduction,” Mechademia 6 (2011): xii.
(3) Takashi Murakami, Superflat (Tóquio: MADRA Publishing, 2000), 5.
(4) Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 39.

Se o álbum G  I  R  L de Pharrell Williams falha como o manifesto feminista, o videoclipe realizado por Mr. e Fantasista Utamaro para o seu single “It Girl” reenquadra-o numa discussão actual em torno  da “juridificação da imaginação”. Numa altura em que a O.N.U. pede mão de ferro para a BD e animação pedo-pornográfica no Japão, este artigo investiga o “complexo bidimensional” das subculturas lolicon e moé, e o modo com a sua fenomenologia abjecta perturba a fronteira entre marginal e mainstream, “nós” e o Outro obsceno.

Space in Japanese animation is superflat. Rather than attempting to mimetically reproduce 3D spaces and movement in depth, Japanese animators have tended to emphasize sideways 2D motion and a dynamic iconography. This technique originated in low-budget TV animation, and over time grew into a distinctive style, which pop artist Murakami Takashi termed superflat. Even with the increased use of CGI, many directors have still chosen to explore the aesthetic potential of a radically 2D picture plane.
One recent intriguing example of superflat style is Puella Magi Madoka Magica (dir. Shinbo Akiyuki, 2012), a two-part theatrical release based on the television series of the same name. A shockingly dark reimaging of the childish "magical girl" genre, Madoka contrasts brutally modernist, spare architectural settings in the "real" world with a baroque "magical" world composed of superflat montages. This contrast of space, between a non-localized collection of depopulated buildings symbolizing the real and the strobing, abstract, superflat images symbolizing the magical is typical of the sekai-kei (end of the world) genre in anime, in which seemingly closed worlds suddenly turn apocalyptic. As the teenage characters negotiate transitioning from school life to the larger world, personal struggles of love, friendship and sexual maturation take on literally earth-shattering dimensions.