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Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Shintaro Miyake: Sweet Summer (short version) Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan. Shintaro Miyake: Sweet Summer (short version)by John McGee Shintaro Miyake, 34, is the latest star to pop from Tomio Koyama Gallery. Like stablemates Takashi Murakami and Yoshimoto Nara, Miyake works with characters. But his colored pencil drawings, obsessively scrawled in a naive style, look more like outsider art than manga. 
Shintaro Miyake, Fluffy,
2003, For his solo debut at Koyama, Miyake chose a summer theme and cast his longtime favorite character, Sweet-san (Ms. Sweet), as the bathing beauty. Sweet-san’s a cute, gangly, idealized imp equal parts ingénue, Bond Girl, and dress-up Barbie. Her wide lozenge of a head—with Bambi eyes, elfin ears, and an open-mouthed, toothless grin—balances atop a spindly body with swooping, limp noodle appendages. Her hair and clothes change constantly. She’s got blue pigtails and a white bikini one minute, a black bob and schoolgirl one-piece swimsuit the next. Over two dozen, foot-high drawings mounted on thin wooden cutouts of the same shape covered one wall. Some were Sweet-san posing in different outfits. The best, however, looked like variations inspired by Botticelli’s Venus. Rather than standing naked on a clamshell, swimsuit-clad Sweet-sans surfed on the backs of jellyfish and giant salamanders. Stretching nearly floor to ceiling and spanning the opposite wall (10'x21’) was Shimoda, a cartoony colored pencil on paper panorama of the seaside resort town where Miyake spent childhood vacations. And, of course, Sweet-san was everywhere: With an archaic smile and multiple forms she was the winsome Kannon crowding Miyake’s summer paradise. Her avatars (most were about 4"-6" high, a few giants reached about 24") climbed hills, visited seafood shacks, and rode on killer whales. They covered the beach beyond Malthusian limits, their variously colored hair, bikinis and accessories overlapping like hundreds of rainbow fish scales. Miyake doesn’t let Sweet-san have all the fashion fun. His key gimmick is wearing homemade costumes that fit the theme of the exhibition while he draws in the gallery during his shows. This time, it was Fluffy, a character costume of sky-blue coveralls printed with white clouds, and an oversized, faceless head resembled Sweet-san’s. Absurdly long ears stretching out from Fluffy's head were held slightly aloft by beach ball-sized, round white helium balloons attached to the ends. 
Shintaro Miyake, Shirosawa,
Sudo, Throughout the exhibition, Fluffy drew his otaku (geek) odalisque on long sheets of paper (4’4”x 14’5”) attached to one of the walls and, by the close of the show, finished three new pieces. The number of assorted smaller Sweet-san drawings and wooden cutouts on the fourth (and final) wall also increased over the course of the show, but were made outside the gallery. Miyake’s shows are usually such combinations of street theater and non-stop production. He first creates a background scenario to set the theme (here, Shimoda; in the past, Star Wars and the arrival of Commodore Perry in Japan). Then he fuses himself with the narratives by making new drawings dressed in character. It’s personalized, one-man epic theater as performance art with a paper trail. _______________________________________This exhibition was held July-Aug 2003 at Tomio Koyama Gallery in Shinkawa, Tokyo, Japan. ©2006 John McGee |
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