Pieter van der Lugt is a freelance writer based in Cape Town. He's available for work in Afrikaans or English and his specialist fields are entertainment, pop culture and literature. See about me for a full CV and contact details.

LUCKY DAY!

YOURS. OR MINE.

SUPERFLAT ART

Chiho Aoshima Japanese culture might seem rich and colourful to you and I but to the artists of the Superflat movement it seems commercial and without substance. The movement got its name from frontman Takashi Murakami and refers to the tradition of flattened forms in Japanese art which lives on in animation and pop culture. In the works of the Superflat artists it also reflects what Takashi calls the "shallow emptiness of Japanese consumer culture."
The best-known Superflat artists include Chiho Aoshima (the work on the right is called Divine Gas), Mahomi Kunikata, Yoshitomo Nara, Tatsuyuki Tanaka and Aya Takano. Manga men Koji Morimoto and Hitoshi Tomizawa have also been called Superflat artists. Henmaru Machino's work is supposed to be satire, but you might find them as kinky (and dodgy) as the "lolicon art" it's targeting.
Murakami says the Superflats make their own pop culture as a protest against the overpowering forces of the media, entertainment and consumer culture. And so the media writes about them, people are entertained by them and they sell by the truckload. It seems ironic, but is precisely what the Superflats wanted to happen.
There are many theories about the Japanese obsession with cuteness (kawaii) and the escapism of the eternal teen geeks, the otaku. Some say it became huge after World War II as a humiliated and traumatised nation tried to forget. Sounds plausible, except that cuteness is also prominent in other Asian op cultures.

TAKASHI MURAKAMI

Takashi Murakami He wanted to be an animator like the famous Yoshinori Kanada, but decided he wasn't good enough to do more than draw the backgrounds for animated movies. Nothing wrong with that career move, since nihon-ga artists are paid as well as the animators themselves. "My goal was to make money and build a traditional Japanese house," Takashi says. "My father was a taxi driver and I was poor as a child. I hate the poor life."
The trouble is he got bored and started hanging out with the computer geeks known as otaku while shaping his own painting style. Soon he had Hiropon Factory, a studio producing paintings and sculptures influenced by pop culture and the traditions of Japanese art. "What is important in Japanese art is the feeling of flatness," he wrote in an essay about the Superflat movement. "Our culture doesn't have 3-D."
On the web site of his current company, Kaikai Kiki, Takashi tells what happened next: "In 1996 I founded the Hiropon Factory, which would become Kaikai Kiki’s predecessor. At the time the 'factory' was nothing more than a small workshop-like group of people assisting me with my sculptures and paintings. Two years before that I had traveled to New York on a scholarship and set up a studio there as well. As I took on new projects, the scale of my production grew and by 2001, when I had a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the Hiropon Factory had grown into a professional art production and management organisation. That same year I registered the company officially as Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. It has developed into an internationally recognised, large-scale art production and artist management corporation."
Japan's critics generally don't like Murakami and his soul mates much. Here's what the Japan Times wrote about one of his exhibitions: "Far from challenging perceptions the show at times comes across as little more than a clever repackaging of selective 'exotic' and 'wacky' features of contemporary Japan for American consumption."
Murakami couldn't care less. He's happily making animated shorts (one was for Louis Vuitton) and has been designing CD covers for the likes of Kanye West and several J-pop groups. It's a living.

KATSUSHIKA HOKUSAI

The little dancing men in my background graphics are by Katsushika Hokusai, the 19th-century artist best known for his woodblock prints of Mount Fuji which includes the Great Wave painting, probably the most famous Japanese art work. He gave the name manga ("playful sketches") to his humorous drawings, mostly of village life. As much as he enjoyed doing them, Katsushika considered them a sideline.
Go here for a mind-boggling 53 pages of his manga. The navigation is a bit of a nightmare but it's well worth the effort.

KAMISHIBAI

Kamishibai is story-telling in a small box theatre with illustrations on sliding panels. The story-teller would go to street corners where kids gathered, set up his little stage and provide free entertainment, ending with a cliff-hanger to ensure his audience would return the next day. He made his money selling sweets before the show. In the mid-thirties Tokyo alone had more than 2 500 kamishibaiya walking the streets.
The stories were traditional tales of ghosts and bravery, dreamt up and illustrated by artists who rented them to the story-tellers. During the war they helped to spread propaganda and after the war, with hardly anyone owning a radio, they helped to spread the news. By threatening to ban them, the American occupational force after the war got the kamishibaiya to deliver their propaganda instead.
The first ever cartoon superhero (five years older than The Phantom, which was the American first) emerged from kamishibai. Golden Bat was a flying skeleton with popping eyes, wonky teeth, a cape and a sword. He came from 10 000 years into the future and his adventures featured aliens, rockets, dinosaurs and giant robots.
When TV landed in Japan in 1953, it was first called denki kamishibai (electric paper theatre). It was also the beginning of the end for the roaming story-tellers. These days only a few novelty acts are left but many of the drawing techniques used for the story boards became standards in anime.
Try the beautifully printed book Manga Kamishibai - The Art of Japanese Paper Theatre by Eric P. Nash for more on the art.

NEWS NISHIKI-E

For about a decade from 1874 onwards Japan got hooked on woodblock prints called "News Nishike-E" because they retold stories from the regular printed media. Retelling meant giving it some spin with rumours, shocking truths and gory illustrations. The Nishiki-E were the tabloids of their day. They told of heroic cops catching thieves, crimes of passion, duels and paranormal mysteries.
Hundreds of them were made and distributed around the country until the government shut the publishers down. They disappeared as suddenly as they had arrived on the scene. Just as well, since the public suddenly had an urge to get the latest news more quickly, which made regular newspapers a better option.
These days a print like the one here is considered art. It shows the ghost of a woman who died because her husband neglected her and returns to moan in his ear about it. The baby wakes up and she nurses it until her husband also opens his eyes, sees the ghost and screams. This is her cue to leave.
There's more at Pink Tentacle, a blog about all kinds of monsters.

ROOTS MANGA

That's a label I made up, but manga has a legnthy history with roots in several ancient styles. Possibly the first manga artist was the 11th-century priest Toba Sojo who drew his devout mates as silly rabbits, farting monkeys or judo master frogs. He didn't add dialogue, but his sets of drawings had a clear story line and followed one another on unfurling scrolls up to 12 metres long.
Manga also has suggestive roots in the kinky shunga (try here if you're old enough), the monster genre yōkai and kibyoshi, picture books with yellow covers published in the 17th century and featuring mostly political satire. A drawing from that time is the first depiction of someone reading a comic book.