Banal modernity.

Passage to the Future: Art from a New Generation in Japan

The Japan Foundation

Toronto

March 10-June 9, 2009

The films, paintings, sculptures, and photographs of "Passage to the Future: Art from a New Generation in Japan" exhibited at the Japan Foundation in Toronto, presented an indictment of the banality that characterizes modern life. Slick, pretty, and traditional surfaces were presented, inviting the viewer to look through their superficiality and into their cultural analysis.

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Twisting tradition and stereotypes with quirky humor, the artist Tabaimo critiques the everyday routines and iconic figures of Japanese life. Her piece, the first seen when entering the exhibition, is an introduction to the quiet, iconoclastic approach to art in "Passage." Little Japanese Kitchen (2003) combined a sculptural mock-up of a traditional Japanese house in which three DVD players and monitors play films that draw on the aesthetics of Edo-era Japanese woodblock prints. The viewer is brought deep into the private domain of a Japanese home where one expects to see domesticity played out with the traditional Japanese values of harmony, serenity, and craft.

Instead, the viewer watches as a middle-aged housewife cooks dinner using various ingredients including a miniaturized, and quite alive, Japanese "salary man"--the iconic figure of the striving Japanese middle class. Her movements, and the accompanying drone of music, depict the distracted boredom of an often-repeated ritual. This surreal tableau turns tradition and expectations inside out--revealing that behind convention's closed doors simmers deep-seated dissatisfaction.

Maywa Denki is an artist collaborative directed by Nobumichi Tosa. They refer to themselves as a "company" and produce films, devices, and "toys." In this exhibition, their films have a 1950s industrial-film feel with uniformed "workers" who, with bland cheerfulness, extoll the virtues of bizarre devices and products. One such device enabled goldfish, using the electrical impulses generated in their tank, to move the keys of a typewriter to type a letter. The film's narrator enthusiastically announces this is the world's first fish-written letter. The films and "products" of Maywa Denki have a Dadaist feel as their work is both irrational and anti-art. The "company" embraces, as their performance art, industrial films and the production of packaged "products" that have no meaning or real purpose, and thus mirror today's consumer culture.

The absurd is also a motif in the work of Atsushi Fukui, whose delicate acrylic and ink painting of cumulus clouds with small, round floating objects is entitled Bathroom Chihuahuas, (2003). The painter's Dusty Window (2002), one of his "bedroom paintings," reflects a deliberately restricted view--i.e., dust accumulating on his bedroom window. The American painter Edward Hopper created work that depicted the sense of alienation in the newly modernized twentieth-century America by using strongly angled light and deep shadows, rich color, and disconnected figures. Fukui's paintings also depict modern alienation. His washed-out colors, soft outlines, and inane subjects are frivolous, meaningless, and are disconnected from the community and the individual. They reflect a modern disengagement with anything beyond one's personal environment.

The photographs of Katsuhiro Saiki focus on skyscapes. The artist's work echoes Fukui's amorphous worlds as Saiki's skies are diluted into tranquil, bland washes. The tides of the works, such as Place #7 (2002) and Place #3 (2002) (both type C prints with acrylic panel on aluminum boards), show that the skies could be in any place at any time. This theme is also seen in the photographs of Masafumi Sanai, whose depictions of a characterless soccer field, a street sign, and an airplane in flight have no references to connect them to a specific culture or community. Like many modern landscapes and objects they are easily reproducible in any environment.

Reminiscent of Damien Hirst's Lullaby Winter (2002), Miyuki Yokomizo's Please Hash Away (2004) also presents a series of colorful, everyday objects that, while briefly attractive, serve no purpose and have no meaning beyond being beautiful. The hanging sculpture of clear glycerine soaps, suspended in transparent plastic envelopes, can be recreated into a variety of shapes and lengths. Their malleability is a contradiction of traditional art forms that rely on context, composition, and technique to define their worth and meaning.

Yokomizo's work also echoes Hirst's challenge to buyers of contemporary art with sculptures such as The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), in which a preserved tiger shark is encased in glass and steel. Hirst's work derives aesthetic and monetary value from what is projected onto it rather than by any display of artistic virtuosity. Random objects have become art and derive value from their marketability, rather than inherent meaning.

In "Passage," the artists have created unique worlds in which everyday objects and scenes join together to become a universe for the viewer, even if it is an absurd and restricted one. The views and brief universes they create are deliberately devoid of spontaneity and passion. These artists are commenting on a modern society disconnected from objects and acts of meaning as well as personal relationships.

J. LYNN FRASER writes for Canadian and international magazines on a variety of topics and is the author of a non-fiction book for children. Currently she is writing two non-fiction books, one for children and the other for adults.