| HOME | ABOUT | ART | TRAVEL | PHOTOS | PRINTS |
|
Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Girl! Girl! Girl! Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan. Girl! Girl! Girl!by John McGee  Yasuko Fujiwara, Helmet, 2003, ABS
resin helmet, acrylic paint, leather Parco Museum's recent "Girls Don't Cry" show had a title tweaked from a Cure song and a dark, broody side to match. Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery's "Girl! Girl! Girl!" plays like Elvis (both Presley and Costello)—it's cool and ironic, if sometimes a little weak in the knees. For his first exhibition as Opera City's new chief curator, Motoaki Hori (formerly of the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura) chose ten young-ish female Japanese artists. "All regard their personal discoveries…within their daily lives as their starting points from which to develop their artworks," Hori writes in the exhibition catalog. Each also uses installation (with different degrees of interactivity) to showcase the different directions those personal discoveries led. 
Tomoko Maezawa, I Am Watching, Yasuko Fujiwara's extended one-liner, Helmet (2003), is a parody of Japan's dual addictions to luxury brands and construction. She painted the walls Hermes-orange and mounted a bold "Helmet" logo (in silver block type) under a pair of work lights. On the floor, stacked orange traffic cones serve as display stands for hand-painted construction workers' helmets. Patterns of shovels and the nuts and bolts of construction replace the saddles and bits of horsy Hermes. Eight large photographs of working men wearing the helmets—one dressed in flared pants and holding a grinder, another posing next to a large machine—hang on the wall like fake advertisements. Another strong and funny piece is Hiroko Ichihara's Please Teach Me English (2002-2003), a wall-long mural of bilingual texts spelled out in black tape. Ichihara posted her often quirky Japanese phrases (here dealing mostly with relationships) to a Japanese website and solicited English translations. She pasted a number of the results, typos and all, on the wall together with the original Japanese text. In her unpredictable dictionary, "hoobaritai no" becomes "I want to cram my mouth with you!" "Give me CHOCOLATE!" and "I'm a squirrel." Tomoko Maezawa's I Am Watching (2003) is a kinder, gentler Julia Scher surveillance piece—more "little brother" than Big Brother. Maezawa posts the least threatening rent-a-cops (most appear to be underfed college students in oversized uniforms) at either end of a long corridor. They and four security cameras watch as you walk down the hall and stop to read a small wall plaque advertising for volunteers to act as guards. Live video feeds into a TV at one end, a convenient place to watch your mini-drama unfold in real time. 
Hiroko Ichihara, Please Teach Me Tomoko Sawada's Madonna (2003) is standard dress-up identity politics. In a boudoir with blood-red walls, a velvet chaise longue, pink fluffy mules on a leopard-skin rug, a rolling drink table stacked with books on beauty, etc., visitors watch a video of the artist being photographed in various guises, from long-sleeved kimono girl to frumpy housewife. In Tanishi K's Stopover (2003), monitors inside a maze of white walls show videos of the artist dressed as a flight attendant pushing a small wagon through subway cars dispensing free drinks. She has a genki time interacting with locals in Barcelona, Seoul and Tokyo, but seems to forget the stereotype of Japanese women is already polite and service-oriented. But these women artists are not trying to be Barbara Krugers, Cindy Shermans or Julia Schers. Most of them are having too much lighthearted fun to worry about heady concepts or stern rhetoric. _______________________________________This exhibition was held Sep-Oct 2003 at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Hatsudai, Tokyo, Japan. ©2006 John McGee |
| CONTACT | TERMS | LINKS |
|
©2006-2008 John McGee. All Rights Reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission. |