ART CITIES:Paris-Mr.’s Melancholy Walk Around the Town
Mr. (Masakatsu Iwamoto) works in a wide range of media, including painting, drawing, video, performance, sculpture, and installation. Having grown up during Japan’s postwar “economic miracle” period, Mr. often exercises his art as a weapon against social expectations. As a member of the otaku* subculture, his work ties closely with the lifestyle which is marked by obsessive interests in anime and manga.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Perrotin Archive
Continuing to expand on a recent body of work last seen in Hong Kong in the exhibition titled “People misunderstand me and the contents of my paintings. They just think they are nostalgic, cute, and look like Japanese anime. That may be true, but really, I paint daily in order to escape the devil that haunts my soul. The said devil also resides in my blood, and I cannot escape from it no matter how I wish. So I paint in resignation”, that showcased a significant progression in the artist’s visual language and themes over the past several years, Mr. launched his solo exhibition “Mr.’s Melancholy Walk Around the Town”. The anticipated showcase features new original paintings by the celebrated Japanese artist. Drawing inspiration from his hometown of Tokyo, the artworks portray his signature anime-inspired motifs and vivid Ero-kawaii** subjects clad in school uniforms. Mr.’s city, the city of Tokyo, and especially the otaku neighborhoods of Akihabara and Ikebukuro, engulfs all that comes into its path, inhalin/g the grotesque and the beautiful, exhaling the phantasmagorical and mundane alike. A space of street scribblings and graffiti, of conspicuous consumption and exhaustion. This is a land of the acerbically saccharine and the bitterly sweet, a land of rupture and flow, exuberance and estrangement. Undoing the stigma of producing paintings or drawings on paper in an anime style, Mr. says “I definitely see no point in mimicking the style of western artists. Instead, I choose my Asian, Japanese, capitalist, born-after-the-war, every-day self as my starting point”. The birth of Mr.’s manga-style characters is rooted in the psychological trauma inflicted from modern-day adversity, whether natural disaster, war or social anxiety, in addition to his obsession with the otaku culture (the term otaku first appeared in a 1983 essay by Akio Nakamori in the manga magazine Manga Burikko). Following the WWII that left Japan in a state of uncertainty, anime and otaku culture proliferated. They are characterized by innocent, untainted young girls and boys as main characters who go on an adventure and successfully achieve their mission in the end.
* The Otaku subculture emerged in Japan in the 1970s and consisted mostly of males who were consumed by manga comics, anime animation, sci-fi literature and video games.
**Ero kawaii (literally “erotic cute”), or erokawa, is a Japanese subculture that draws on Western notions of sexiness, in contrast to the popular cuteness (kawaii) trend. The term is a fusion of ero (shortened from the English word “erotic”, which has negative connotations in Japanese culture) and the lighter kawaii, meaning “cute”. It was coined in 2005 by singer Kumi Koda using the term to describe her own style.
Info: Galerie Perrotin, 76 rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 19/1-9/3/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.perrotin.com
