Turning Japanese

Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara’s cotton-candy-colored paintings and sculptures depict cute kids in fluffy animal suits, but also include disturbing details such as knives, scowls and slash marks. Nara doesn’t consider the deviant children to be aggressive, though. “I’m creating this generation that has no power,” he once told an interviewer. “I’m articulating or producing a scream for them.”

Nara’s comments offer insight into the popularity of Tokyo Pop — a style of Japanese imagery that combines sexualized pop culture with fine art, violence with cuteness, tradition with technology. Organizers of the exhibit Tokyo Pop, opening Sunday at the Gallery at Village Shalom, posit that this blending of opposing elements is precisely what grabs our attention. But Nara’s theory — that a generation nurtured on happy logos relates to images that contradict such a reality — goes further toward answering why.

The style that’s been labeled “Japanese” is becoming ever more global. For example, the English-language magazine Giant Robot is a slick-looking publication that lets American hipsters in on the cool stuff that’s happening in Asian and Asian-American arts communities. (The periodical also touts the merits of Japan’s various canned coffee drinks.) And a handful of local artists are doing work that’s strikingly similar to Nara’s.

Lori Raye Erickson’s pink-and-blue paintings of stuffed bunnies and monkeys — rendered in a flat, simple cartoon style that lends innocence and nostalgia to an already childlike theme — have the cute, endearing look of Nara’s works. But the paintings hint at violence, incorporating stitches normally used to seal wounds, and the characters’ eyes are often replaced by sad-looking Xs. What makes both artists’ paintings powerful is that whatever is wrong — the wound, the knife, the frown — stands out because it exists in the happy world of advertisements and cartoons, where we are accustomed to everything being perfect.

Erickson uses a simple technique partly because it feels comfortable for her, but she also feels a need to create work that is accessible. “I think it’s easy to relate to the images,” Erickson explains, noting that crudely drawn stuffed animals effortlessly conjure up comfort and childhood. “But I like to throw in a little twist,” she adds, referring to the implied violence of her “fluff” paintings. “It’s always fun to get people pissed off,” she says, laughing. “Or, just to make them think.”

Local animators in the small, downtown design firm known as MK12 don’t just happen to work in the same vein as Japanese artists; they appropriate images from Japanese product packaging and the Japanese alphabet. The company doesn’t see its use of all things cute and Japanese as a superficial nod to a distant culture.

“Japanese advertising has an advantage,” the designers explain. “Their alphabet and their mythical characters have a great sense of design, which makes for a unique visual language that now seems to be referenced by everyone in the world.”