Young Japanese artists seem to be immersed in a Symbolist/ Introspective search - a response to the crises of Japanese culture and society, a feeling of unease, insecurity, limited prospects etc. To quote my favorite 'raver' the late Terence McKenna, "As the inevitable chaostrophy approaches people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets itself into trouble it casts itself back to the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew." The fourth year students responses are to a kind of archaic revival, a returning to the liminal zones of childhood, primitive mark making, symbolist and romantic landscapes, animistic visions where humans and animals communicate, ethereal, mist-like abstractions which evoke ectoplasmic photographs of the late C19th, parodies of European classicism and Myth, fairy tales and Pre-Raphaelite imagery, psychological imagery of shattered bodies, fragmentation, isolation and dolls. All of these motifs and themes can be traced to pre or early Modernist art concerns. They seem to be emerging now in Japan, following a century of searching for a 'Japanese Modernism' in the mold of Europe and America. The formal concerns of Mono-Ha and Appropriation (post-modernism) have been eclipsed by urges to return to an Older past, states of infancy, paradisical childhood and immersion in ideas of Nature.
The problem though is that much of this is carried out Formally - as simple quoting from familiar, well trodden, cliched sources, popular culture, manga etc. The potential radicality of this project is almost erased. What it can be is a serious and intelligent MINING, an ARCHAEOLOGY, of history, those pre-modern ideas and experiences which were largely supressed by Modern processes in the Meiji period as well as by Post-War US occupation administration. The traces, seeds of something interesting seem to be there in many of these works, but they remain refractions, simulacra. The students need to get out into the woods, start farming, research folk Shinto and its rituals, REALLY dream and use the imagination as devices to re-vision Japanese society today and their experiences in it.
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