Before sept. 11, there was March 20, 1995. On a sunny spring morning, five members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult entered the Tokyo subway and pierced plastic packs of liquefied sarin gas with their umbrella tips, leaving 12 people dead and thousands injured. Only two months before, more than 5,000 people were killed by an earthquake that shook the western port city of Kobe. "Some strange malaise, some bitter aftertaste lingers on," writes novelist Haruki Murakami in his account of the times, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. "We crane our necks and look around us, as if to ask: where did all that come from?"
A generation of Japanese artists who went to art school during that calamitous decade and are now in their 30s have also been craning their necks and asking questions. Raised on the promise of an economic bubble that burst in the early '90s, this artistic generation is both wide-eyed and dark-spirited-and creatively seizing the moment with a large survey exhibition, "Facts of Life," at London's Hayward Gallery. "It is a time in which there is a profound sense of anxiety about the future as well as a strong sense of self-reflection and analysis," says curator Rachel Kent, who has brought nine emerging Japanese artists and their work to Australia for "neo-tokyo: Japanese Art Now," which runs at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art until Feb. 10.
Visitors to the MCA will be immediately struck, not by darkness but by an explosion of Day-Glo pop. Kenji Yanobe's bubble-blowing Astro Boy wall sculpture, Myeong-eun Shin's floor of 400 plastic pink poodles, and Satoshi Hirose's room of 5,000 fragrant lemons seem to celebrate Japan's ongoing culture of kawaii (cute). But like a sugar-coated almond, "neo-tokyo" leaves a slightly bitter aftertaste.
Around the corner from Shin's pooch park, Miwa Yanagi's floor-to-ceiling DVD projection places the viewer in a dark, endlessly receding corridor. White-coated female figures appear and vanish through doors off to the sides, whispering and gesturing. We could be in a mental hospital playing out some mysterious psychodrama. In another gallery space, five child-like sculptures are gathered in a circle. With their primary colors and beatific expressions, Yoshitomo Nara's Little Pilgrims (Nightwalkers), 1998, could be the Teletubbies-until one notices they are swaddled in bandages. These enigmatic figures are portraits of "a generation that somehow lost its way and is facing an uncertain future," says curator Kent, "a damaged generation." In this sense, "neo-tokyo" is very much the art of post-traumatic healing.
A year after the Tokyo subway attacks, Osaka-born Kenji Yanobe began creating his radiation-proof suits and cars, as well as traveling to nuclear test and accident sites such as Nevada and Chernobyl. "I'm not really a strong man mentally or physically," says the artist. "That's why I have to make something, a protective suit, because I'm really a coward, afraid of many things. I have to create something. I have to survive." For Sydney's Antenna of the World, 2001, Yanobe places a life-size figure of himself amid 400 miniature "Atom" figures, some of which flash and emit Geiger-counter bleeps. His mouth screams soundlessly, an
artistic prophet of doom.
If some of these artists see life as a continuing war zone, Taro Shinoda has devised his own novel means of escape. With Personal Satellite Project, 2000, he has constructed a suite of prototype rocket launchers and satellites which he plans eventually to send into space. For this, Shinoda's inspiration is Japan's annual Bon Festival, when paper lanterns are sent down waterways in the hope of transporting the souls of the dead.
Other artistic concerns in the Sydney show are more earthbound. Over the past five years, New York City-based Momoyo Torimitsu has sent a battery-operated salaryman robot, "Miyata Jiro," crawling the streets of London, Rio de Janeiro and Sydney. With the artist, dressed as a nurse, presiding, the whole robot tour is videotaped. For Torimitsu, the salaryman is the casualty of an economic war lost last decade, a shattered soul in need of nurturing.
Tokyo artist Masato Nakamura, whose shrine of McDonald's arches recently graced the Venice Biennale, comments on a different kind of war-a cultural one. For his Sydney installation Minimal Selves, 2001, Nakamura liaised with eight convenience-store chains to reproduce their neon logos in a darkened gallery space. While such works might suggest the victory of Western corporate culture over Tokyo's skyline, the effect is peculiarly Japanese. Beautifully serene, not submissive, Nakamura's lightbox logos form a chapel in which the viewer can meditate on the future. Having grown up in "this neon generation," he says, "one has to take on a new way of thinking to give to the next generation."
And so "neo-tokyo" concludes with a message of hope from an emerging underground of artists unafraid to grapple with present-day anxieties or turn a painful past into objects of edifying beauty.