Bye Bye Kitty!!!: Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art

by David Elliott, Tetsuya Ozaki, Japan Society (New York, N.Y.), Gallery Staff

In recent decades Japanese art has achieved immense popularity in the West while being little understood. Critics have focused on the superficiality and infantilism they find prevalent in much of the work, while many Westerners are familiar with the country's artistic side solely through manga and anime. Bye Bye Kitty!!! offers a more incisive and wide-ranging view of the contemporary Japanese art scene, depicted through the works of fifteen artists, ranging in age from twenty-seven to forty-five and working in painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and video.

The book's title invokes the subtle irony and subversive techniques adopted by this new generation of artists in their rebellion against the kawaii, or "cute," aesthetic of mainstream Japanese culture. An essay by David Elliott provides an overview of the artists and explores many of the societal questions, such as the role of feminism, the rise of the "salaryman," and reflections on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, featured in their works. A contribution by Tetsuya Ozaki illuminates the history and culture of Japan's current Heisei era, which began in January 1989 after the death of Emperor Hirohito.

The artists featured in Bye Bye Kitty!!! demonstrate that they have the power not only to reconfigure international stereotypes about the current state of Japanese art but also to shape the very landscape of contemporary Japanese art itself.

Genres: Art, Japan, Art History

136 pages, Paperback

First published March 29, 2011

About the author

1939-

Reviews

[Dillon · Rating 4 out of 5]

really great. makes a point of highlighting artists of a more explicitly critical orientation than takashi murakami, who is portrayed as a sort-of baby's first contemporary japanese art theorist.

artists that stood out to me: makoto aida, manabu ikeda, tomoko kashiki, motohiko odani, hisashi tenmyouya, yamaguchi akira, tomoko yoneda

[Rhonda Hankins]

I love the cover of this book. It screamed at me from the library bookshelf. I assumed, mistakenly, that it was going to be anime/mangaish and was amused to see harsh criticism from Murakami about vapid art forms. Sigh. I like vapid though I guess it's not something to admit publicly. His points are well made and, obviously worthy of respect and yet I delight in colorful, joyful, cheerfulness for the sake of cheerfulness so was sorry that the book cover aesthetic wasn't more represented on the interior pages. But I digress.

This is a beautifully produced book. High quality pages with exquisite reproductions of diverse artworks by a bunch of Japanese artists that I think were pretty well unknown at the time of this exhibit (and may still be for all I know). For some reason, I found the text really hard to read not because it was poorly written but because the font or the spacing or something about the color of the text just was hard for me to focus on so I gave up on reading the essays, which is too bad because I think they would probably be enlightening.

Anyway, I'm not ready to say Bye Bye Kitty, though perhaps it is time to do so . . .

[Hayleigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting and beautiful artwork.

[Frederic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Catalogue of a 2011 exhibit, which must have been a fun one. The two introductory essays here would be a pretty good introduction to contemporary Japanese fine art (including some photography, but not a lot), but one would want to add in some more pop-art works of various sorts to really have a fuller understanding of the range.