Lehmann Maupin has announced Those that Bring Color to Life and Living, an exhibition of new works by pioneering Japanese artist Mr., marking the artist’s debut solo presentation in London.
Across a new body of work including painting, sculpture, and works on paper, the exhibition harnesses the Japanese aesthetics of anime (presented with motion and sound) and manga (presented in a print medium) as a means of examining Japanese culture, fusing high and low forms of contemporary expression. The works on view continue Mr.’s longstanding interest in the circulation of popular imagery and its role in fantastical or escapist world-building that stems from postwar Japanese youth subculture. Those that Bring Color to Life and Living will be the second gallery exhibition to take place at Lehmann Maupin’s temporary location at No.9 Cork Street, in the heart of London’s Mayfair neighborhood.
A former protégé of Takashi Murakami, the artist is well known for his associations with Superflat, a contemporary postmodern Japanese movement pioneered by Murakami that draws inspiration from the compressed treatment of space and bold planes of color that appear throughout Japanese art and culture—from 19th-century ukiyo-e prints, to pop art, to anime and manga. Mr.’s participation in the 2000 traveling exhibition Superflat (organized by Murakami) played a crucial role in earning him international attention and recognition.
Mr.’s influences are expansive and eclectic, extending beyond the Superflat genre; the artist also has a particular affinity for the 1960s Italian Arte Povera movement for its use of unconventional materials and its reverence for the overlooked objects of everyday life. Mr.’s earliest paintings and drawings were done on store receipts, takeout menus, and other scraps of transactional detritus. Similarly, in his exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum in 2015, Mr. presented a large-scale, immersive installation of garbage and everyday objects from Japanese life, standing as a reminder of the debris that blanketed Tohoku in the aftermath of the 2011 disaster. His contemporary works retain traces of everyday objects, often integrated in the imagery reflected in his subjects eyes or gestured towards in the text that adorns his compositions.
Across varied mediums, the works on view in Those that Bring Color to Life and Living explore otaku—an increasingly prevalent and popular Japanese subculture oriented around reclusion and retreat into immersive fantasy worlds, particularly manga and anime. Mr. specifically situates his engagement with otaku amidst postwar Japanese history. Having grown up during Japan’s postwar “economic miracle” period, Mr. often exercises his art as a weapon against social expectations. In this exhibition, he harnesses otaku to build an immersive, colorful, and alluring environment, composed of a cast of avatar characters and the popular imagery they consume and live with. The works in the exhibition offer an escape—a return to innocence that rejects authority and political engagement in favor of fantasy and virtual experience.
Mr.’s shaped head paintings depict young, starry-eyed otaku characters. Upon close inspection, each character’s eyes reflect a range of icons from popular culture, sparkling with their inner lives and reflecting aspects of the world around them—one inundated with the tensions between order and chaos, naivete and cynicism, quotidian and commercial, real and imagined. Far from a dispassionate observer, Mr. is himself immersed in otaku culture, and has noted that his works are at times reflections of
his personal interests in fantasy and imaginative world-building. At the same time, the artist’s many-layered, imaginative worlds are never disconnected from historical trauma or contemporary reality, and at every turn, he reveals popular visual culture to be saturated with desire, fantasy, and a longing for innocence.
Interested in bridging popular visual and high-art cultures, Mr. has compared himself to a translator, positioning anime, manga, and other hallmarks of otaku in the realm of fine art for a global audience. As he reinterprets otaku aesthetics for an international art world in Those that Bring Color to Life and Living, Mr. is simultaneously outsider and insider, reporter and diarist.
Mr. Those that Bring Color to Life and Living, October 31st – November 16th, 2024 No.9 Cork Street
About the artist
Mr. (b. 1969, Cupa, Japan, lives and works in Saitama, Japan) approaches the visual language of anime and manga as a means of examining Japanese culture, fusing high and low forms of contemporary expression. Like his fellow Superflat artists, such as Takashi Murakami, Mr. utilizes otaku, the “cute” Japanese subculture that is marked by an obsession with adolescence, manga, anime, and video games. Alongside his interest in otaku is an engagement with the 1960s Italian art movement, Arte Povera. Inspired by these artists’ use of unconventional materials and purposeful amateurism, Mr.’s earliest manga-style paintings and drawings were on store receipts, takeout menus, and other scraps of transactional detritus.
Prior to 2010, Mr. often incorporated the hypersexualized portrayal of young women prevalent in otaku into his work. Known in Japan as lolicon, a portmanteau of “Lolita Complex,” this word has come to refer to the otaku preference for graphic anime images of young girls. However, in the years since the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear reactor meltdown in Tohoku, Japan, Mr. has paired the cute characters, bright colors, and clean finishes characteristic of his work with a gritty and abstract painting style reminiscent of his early Arte Povera-inspired work, through which he explores themes of destruction. In his exhibition with Lehmann Maupin in 2012 and at the Seattle Art Museum in 2015, Mr. presented a largescale, immersive installation of garbage and everyday objects from Japanese life, standing as a reminder of the debris that blanketed Tohoku in the aftermath of the 2011 disaster. Viewers were invited to physically interact with the work, getting a glimpse into the psychological state of Japan while remaining alien to the experience. Since then, Mr. has extended this sentiment into his paintings, trampling, tearing and burning his canvases to give his surfaces a distressed, textured quality, often at odds with the innocence of the bright-eyed cartoon figures he paints on top.
Mr. graduated from the Department of Fine Arts, Sokei Art School in Tokyo in 1996. Solo exhibitions of his work have been organized at Perrotin, Paris, France (2024); the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ (2022); HOW Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2021); Musée Guimet, Paris, France (2019), Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA (2014); and Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, Lyon, France (2006). Select group exhibitions featuring his work include MURAKAMI VS MURAKAMI, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2019); Bishojo: Young Pretty Girls in Art History, Museum of National Taipei University of Education, Taipei, Taiwan (2019); Monsters, Manga and Murakami, Musée en Herbe, Paris, France (2019); Megane To Tabisuru Bijyutsuten, Aomori Museum of Art, Aomori, Japan (2018); Create Your Own Original Doraemon, Mori Art Center Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2017); Islands, Constellations & Galapagos, Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama, Japan (2017); Murakami by Murakami, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway (2017); Animamix Biennale 2015-2016, Daegu Art Museum, Daegu, South Korea (2015-16); Kyoto-Tokyo: From Samurais to Mangas, Grimaldi Forum, Monaco (2010); Animate, Fukuokan Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan (2009); KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art, Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada (2008); RED HOT: Asian Art Today from the Chaney Family Collection, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX (2007); and Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, Japan Society, New York, NY (2005). Mr.’s work is in numerous international public and private collections, including Daegu Art Museum, South Korea; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; and Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada.
