Art, Hiking and Travel in Japan - Shintaro Miyake - Art - Tomio Koyama Gallery - Tokyo

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Shintaro Miyake: Sweet Summer (long version)

How about Shimoda for summer vacation? There’s a beach, aquarium, mountains and, through Shintaro Miyake’s eyes, hundreds of women everywhere. In this summer-themed exhibition of new drawings and sculpture, his first solo show at Tomio Koyama Gallery, Miyake (b. 1970) reworks happy memories of childhood days spent on the Izu coast.

Shintaro Miyake, Fluffy, 2003,
chicken wire, fabric, balloons,
installation view; behind, Shimoda,
2003, colored pencil on paper,
345x645cm (Photos: John McGee)

Miyake’s myriad cartoon figures are all avatars of his favorite character and main actress, Sweet-san. In the two wall-sized panoramic colored pencil drawings, bikini-clad Sweet-sans with giant lozenge heads and posable wet-noodle limbs lie on the beach. They watch their fellow Sweet-sans in wetsuits ride the backs of killer whales at the Shimoda aquarium. They climb Nesugatayama Mountain. But Shimoda is really just an excuse for Miyake’s primary motivation. “I want to draw many cute girls,” he says.

With her irrepressible, open-mouthed smile, Sweet-san is like a Prozac sister of the tough kids drawn by another artist to pop from Koyama’s star-maker gallery, Yoshitomo Nara. But rather than Nara’s monumental individuals, Miyake’s Sweet-san is an endlessly self-replicating Agent Smith, each generation rendered in a different hue. Miyake’s obsessive mark-making coupled with copy-and-paste overlapping of figures weaves colorful abstract patterns that reference both modern cute and Japanese traditional (think of the endless rows of Kannon sculpture at Sanjusangendo Temple in Kyoto, for example).

Actually, in addition to his personal interests and the psychological implications of being raised by a mother and three older sisters, Miyake cites outsider artists as influences. With all the girls, it’s hard not to think of Henry Darger (minus the blood and guts) though Miyake himself counts Oswald Tschirtner and Johann Hauser as favorites.

The Sweet-san sculptures are different from the drawings. Each of the flat, painted plywood cutouts is a unique persona. Most, however, adopt variations on the pose of Botticelli’s Venus, surfing on the backs of Pacific Ocean jellyfish rather than emerging from Mediterranean shellfish. As in the drawings, Sweet-san always looks out at the viewer.

Shintaro Miyake, Shirosawa, Sudo,
and Emoto, all works 2003, colored
pencil on cardboard on wood, approx.
33x40x0.5cm

Or perhaps she smiles and winks knowingly at her creator. This otaku odalisque is more than the shaggy artist true love—she’s his alter ego. Miyake often transforms into Sweet-san by donning various homemade costumes. Throughout this exhibition, however, he wears Fluffy (2003), a sky costume of blue fabric covered with white clouds, an oversized head with no face, and incredibly long floppy rabbit ears held up by balloons. So garbed, he continues to draw the girls beyond the Malthusian limits of the paper and onto the gallery walls.

Costumed performance is a Miyake trademark. He says that doing “live drawing” at his exhibitions while wearing character costumes creates a good relationship with visitors, like meeting the “real” Mickey Mouse at Disneyland, and inspires him to work harder. For previous shows, Miyake has dressed as a Kabuki actor, a pink Godzilla and Darth Vader and C3-PO (while doing a hilarious reenactment of the X-wing fighter vs. Death Star climax of the first "Star Wars" movie).

But it’s Sweet-san who has kept reappearing in Miyake’s work off and on for the last three or four years. This reliance on a recurring character recalls another stablemate, Takashi Murakami. However unlike Murakami’s Mr. DOB, Miyake’s Sweet-san has no relation to manga or similar grade-school interests of his peers. “Other kids collected Ultraman trading cards,” says the artist. “I had Guinness Book of World Records cards…you know, like ‘the world’s largest pumpkin.’” Maybe that explains the big heads.

This exhibition was held July-Aug 2003 at Tomio Koyama Gallery in Shinkawa, Tokyo, Japan.