Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Girls Don't Cry: Girls in Contemporary Art

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Girls Don't Cry: Girls in Contemporary Art

by John McGee

Makoto Aida, DOG (Snow), 1998, pigments on Japanese paper (Images courtesy 
Parco Museum of Art)

In Shibuya, young women usually find their identities hanging on clothes racks, not gallery walls. "Girls Don't Cry" at Parco Museum looks past the department store reflections to see how female identity is expressed through the contemporary art of different cultures. 

The exhibition's title has two meanings, says curator Hiromi Kitazawa. "The image of girls is getting stronger, changing from being dreamy or feminine, so girls don't have to cry," she says. "[Asian] men think of girls as objects...so they can't cry because they are not alive but like dolls." 

Despite the rhetoric, the exhibition is more thought-provoking than didactic. Kitazawa crammed Parco's small space with the work of 18 artists—half from Japan and half from America, Austria, Finland, Holland or Korea—to reveal the diversity in what she calls "the real image of girls now." 

Ryoko Aoki, A Sketch of Memories, 
1997 (Courtesy of Parco)

The conceptual range is huge—coming-of-age, social inequality, body image, interior worlds and more. But some patterns emerge, mostly along geopolitical lines. 

The three Finnish artists offer some of the more complex ideas. In Aurora Reinhard's short documentary Boygirl (2002), three androgynous women talk about how they fit, or don't, into society. Eija-Liisa Ahtila's five short portraits of mentally ill women, The Present (2001), are television miniatures of her installations at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery. The toughest is Salla Tykkä's sexually charged Power (1999), a black-and-white video of a bare-breasted young female David sparring with a giant musclehead Goliath, the theme song from "Rocky" blaring in the background. 

Though overt gender struggle has been moderately successful in parts of the West, Kitazawa says that Japanese are not comfortable with the group dynamic that women's rights movements require. Instead, they have chosen to express their emerging sexual freedom on a personal level. 

But in Japan, women are allowed to be girls forever. The female Japanese artists here employ stock tropes of youthful femininity—flowers, kimono, cute girls and friendly animals—without irony. Their work is generally good, e.g. Kyoko Murase's swimming Ophelias (2002-3), Mika Kato's detailed, hero-sized portrait painting of an incredibly cute homemade doll Canaria (1999), and Ryoko Aoki's installation of overlapping drawings of trees and plants (2003). But together they add up to mediated, Edenic fantasies born of sexual repression, not newfound freedoms. In Aya Takano's saccharine illustrations, unclothed, prepubescent string bean girls sit on happy hippos. All that it's missing are rainbows. The Japanese half of this show needs the cute AND creepy dystopia of someone like Chiho Aoshima. 

Karen Kilimnik, me-l forgot the wire 
cutters getting the wire cutters from 
the car to break into Stonehenge, 1982,
1999

Instead, it gets cruel Makoto Aida, one of the three male artists, who, unlike the man in Tykkä's video, doesn't pull his punches. His biting critique of the Japanese objectification of young women is a set of three nihonga-style paintings showing smiling, naked kogals on leashes. Their arms and legs are bandaged stumps, having been hacked to make them look like doggies. One tromps through the snow, another sits under falling cherry blossoms, and a third gazes at the moon. They're horrifying, but they also engage the complications of "girl" rather than just the motif. 

This is one of the weaknesses of the show: is it about girls or grrrls? To its credit, it tries to be both. But it's too small to do so adequately, and its controlled comparisons between Japanese artists and those from a careful selection of other countries feel somewhat incomplete.

This exhibition was held Mar-May 2003 at Parco Museum of Art in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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