By Victoria Chin

Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture offers surprise, cuteness, emotion, history, and anything else you could possibly want from art. The New York City Japan Society's most recent exhibition featured a variety of unconventional media that tell you more about contemporary Japanese culture than a history book ever could.

You couldn't miss this exhibition if you tried. A gigantic banner adorned the entire front of the Japan Society building on 47th Street, near the United Nations. As if that were not enough, an enormous yellow elephant with multicolored underwear sat at the mouth of Central Park in the heart of New York City's high-end shopping district, on 5th Avenue and 60th Street. Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture took New York by storm, but did you expect any less? This exhibition was masterfully arranged by pop-art and fashion superstar Takashi Murakami.

This display of drawings, sculpture, toys, video animations, and a variety of other media comprise the culture of a post-WWII Japan. The title of the exhibition, Little Boy, is a reference to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, but also alludes to a notion of Japan's infantilized culture. The focus is otaku -- a pop-cult fanaticism -- that came about as a result of the trauma from the war. What better way to cover a dark and discordant time than with an abundance of saccharine sweet media?

Before entering the exhibition, audiences are confronted by an enormous yellow blob called “Aesthetic Pollution," by Noboru Tsubaki. This piece definitely throws you off, as it offers a very extreme contrast to the low-key bamboo garden in which it sits. In the first room of the actual display, another enormous object confronts you, except this one is a green Zaku head from the Mobile Suit Gundam anime series. At this point, it's obvious that surprise will be a theme throughout the exhibit.

The four walls of the first room are saturated with delightful, wide-eyed characters in various forms of media. Most noticeable are the oversized Yuru Chara character statues clad in brightly colored costumes and the happiest of smiles on their faces. On the pink back wall were hundreds of items, including stuffed animals, stationery, toys, bags, and more, all bearing the world-renowned face of Hello Kitty. The less attention-grabbing wall to the left, however, gives you the first taste of what the exhibition is really about, with its combination of light and dark undertones. This wall featured a series of subdued acrylic paintings by Aya Takano, starring a girl with a childlike idealism in her eyes, but also a sad and empty countenance. In one picture, she was missing a shoe; in another, she held onto a string that was tied to a bat.

The next room brings out the dark theme of the Takano paintings in full force. E-monogatari, or serialized pictorial stories, decorates the first wall. Shigeru Komatsuzaki's graphic representations of war in the Pacific and futuristic scenes of destruction became popular after the war. These paintings were extremely detailed, realistic, and painful, making them seem out of place among the rest of the media. The other side of the room offered a sharp contrast, a recurring theme of the exhibition. Doraemon comics, toys, and a flat-panel television playing the beloved blue cat's cartoon create a light-hearted ambience that almost makes you forget about the depressing e-monogatari. That is, until you reach the next portion.

A hallway decorated by none other than the APA favorite Godzilla follows. The Godzilla figurines, large and small, were dated from 1954 to 1995. Behind these figurines, however, was Article nine of the Japanese Constitution, or the Renunciation of War. Though this is the only concretely historical item shown, it somehow fits in nicely with the other items. How appropriate for the next room to feature cute vintage toys with labels like “Made in occupied Japan”.

The exhibition proceeds into a well-lit room with higher ceilings and sketches from popular anime series lining the walls. Drawings from the Ultraman cartoons by Tohl Narita, a favorite of otaku artists, showed monsters evolving into stones, trees, and buildings. Narita managed to infuse these flat illustrations with texture that appeared to be 3-d. The perpendicular wall featured the individual flip pages from the Daicon IV opening animation, surrounding a flat-panel TV playing Daicon IV episodes.

The last room can be described in one word: bittersweet. A life-sized canvas in the shape of a human body lies on a table covered by glass. But this cadaver-like piece by Mahomi Kunikata features sushi on the chest and stomach -- sushi with adorable pictures of people, that is. The paintings that grace this final room's walls are perhaps the most beautiful in all the exhibition. Hideaki Kawashima's work is comprised of silhouettes of human heads in soft, inviting colors, with eyes as their only features. These eyes are large and beautiful, but melancholy and brooding at the same time. This simplicity is all the explanation you need to grasp the irony of the exhibition: anguish concealed by a facade of cuteness.

Little Boy leaves you with a sense of wonder more than anything else. Would this overly cute media have emerged at all had the outcome of the war been different? Mark Stevens, who previously reviewed the exhibition, wrote, “The key argument here is that, far from being just sugary kitsch, Japanese pop represents the strange, even psychotic response of a population traumatized by World War II, and then made impotent and infantilized by occupation. Fantasy can provide an escape from art history. Art averts. Art anesthetizes.” But perhaps their response wasn't so strange or psychotic after all. Japan has always been recognized as a country whose citizens have a deep sense of national pride. The trauma from the war created a sort of gilded age, one in which pop culture emphasized the appearance of being more than alright as a way for the Japanese to compensate for the despondency that was reality.

Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture ran from April 8 to July 24, 2005.

For more information, or to see a list of the Japan Society's upcoming exhibitions, visit: www.japansociety.org

Published: Thursday, July 6, 2006