Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Muneteru Ujino: Japan Series (short version)

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Muneteru Ujino: Japan Series (short version)

by John McGee

This show was a significant departure for Muneteru Ujino. The artist's previous "Love Arm" sculptures were homemade, wearable, electrified musical instruments, such as a long wood-laminate box outfitted with a pair of motorcycle handlebars, headlights and turn signals. Ujino is well known in Tokyo as half of the art band Gorgerous, whose name is a hybrid of "gorgeous," "dangerous" and "glamorous." Now the artist seems to be applying a similar playful cross-pollination to the linguistic and cultural challenges facing 21st-century Japan. 

Muneteru Ujino, G-pan, 2002, wood
(Image courtesy the artist and
Mizuma Art Gallery)

His recent show looked like a sign shop for a dysfunctional Japanese Disneyland. The Tokyo-based artist, 38, used katakana characters—the relatively straight and blocky phonetic syllables used to write words imported from English and other foreign tongues—to construct playful sculptures, paintings and ink drawings based on mistaken adaptations. Novel applications of loan words often create unintentionally humorous or bewildering coinages; Ujino's works monumentalize the mix of English and Japanese. 

In some pieces, he literalizes the words, making their shapes or surfaces refer to or mimic their meanings. The characters for "one-room mansion" (which means a studio apartment) were made of wood covered in Western-style wallpaper and installed in a chintzy, narrow, waist-high light box ringed with small yellow lights, similar to the signs real-estate agents wheel onto the sidewalk in front of their shops.

Other pieces combined traditional Japanese forms with loan words. Three doorway-sized, unpainted wood sculptures looked like vertical versions of ranma, the decorative wooden transoms that fit above sliding shoji doors and allow air to flow between rooms in traditional houses. Instead of the landscape designs usually featured, however, Ujino carved a set of clothing terms: G-pan (jeans), Y-shats (men's dress shirt) and T-baku (thong underwear). 

Twenty-one Century (the original Japanese translation, later corrected to "twenty-first century"), was a big, flamboyant wall-mounted piece. Each manga-inspired phonetic symbol was unique, wrought in its own eye-popping color and dynamic design—buzzing pink, fuzzy fuchsia and swirling green. The result looked like a Jack Pierson text sculpture assembled from katakana letters cut out by Roy Lichtenstein.

Some of Ujino's Japanese contemporaries also use text. Hiroko Ichihara, for example, makes humorous installations with instructions written in Japanese characters. Ujino's text work, however, seems to be moving more in the direction of Xu Bing's Chinese-character landscapes or Ed Ruscha's word paintings, by toying with slippages in form, meaning and interpretation

This Muneteru Ujino exhibition was held July-Aug 2002 at Mizuma Art Gallery in Naka-Meguro, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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