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The “Triumph” of Japanese Neo-Pop: A Historical Evaluation

Hiroko Ikegami 1

1Kobe University

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Who represents contemporary Japanese art today? The first name that comes to anyone’s mind would be Murakami Takashi, who held a successful solo show at the Palaces Versailles in 2010 and also holds the record price by a living Japanese artist with his signature work My Lonesome Cowboy (1998) having sold for $15.2 million in 2007 at Sotheby’s New York. In addition, Murakami’s gift as a curator was widely acknowledged when he organized for New York’s Japan Society in 2005 Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture ,which received an award of the “Best Thematic Museum Show in New York” from AICA USA, an American section of International Association of Art Critics. This paper examines this “triumph” of Japanese Neo-Pop in a historical perspective, by comparing Little Boy to the exhibition entitled The New Japanese Painting and Sculpture, the first large-scale exhibition of Japanese contemporary art in the United States, organized and traveled by the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1965-67. Despite the great distance of four-decades that separates Little Boy and The New Japanese Painting and Sculpture, it is helpful to compare the two exhibitions in terms of agency and discourse, asking such questions as “Who organized the exhibition?” and “What kind of narrative was created for the exhibit?” While the lack of these two ingredients marked The New Japanese Painting and Sculpture a critical failure, Murakami had a clear agenda regarding what to show and how to narrate his exhibit. The two exhibitions are also historically connected through the patronage of John D. Rockefeller 3rd, who promoted cultural exchange between the U.S. and Japan after World War II. While he revived the Japan Society as its president after WWII, his namesake foundation, The JDR 3rd Fund,supported The New Japanese Painting and Sculpture and funded Asia Cultural Council,from which Murakami received a grant to spend one year in New York in 1994-95. This connection points to another important issue in this paper: that is, the presence of America in postwar Japan. If such Anti-Art artists as Shinohara Ushio and Kojima Nobuaki dealt with this question in the 1960s, Murakami differently engaged the same question in the 2000s. With a well-planned discursive strategy, Murakami succeeded in establishing a narrative of Japanese contemporary art and culture that did not depend upon Euro-American models of modernism, through a joint labor with Alexandra Munroe,the then director of Japan Society Gallery who commissioned him to curate Little Boy. However, that narrative was based on his nationalistic historical determinism and narrative of victimhood based on Japan’s experience of two atomic bombs and defeat of World War II, which could undermine the actual diversity of Japanese contemporary art. As will be demonstrated with the case of Teruya Yūken, how the “U.S. problems” in postwar Japan is confronted varies from one artist to another within each generation. Through this historical analysis, this paper will present the “triumph” of Japanese Neo-Pop as an ambivalent legacy for the future generation of Japanese artists.

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