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"I'm an urban creature; the countryside frightens me," says Kyoto-born Noboru Tsubaki, whose Fresh Gasoline, 1989, a 9-ft.-high bulbous yellow pod, is the most startling work in the show. The creepy beauty and rich surface texture of Tsubaki's monstrous blob, with tentacle-like branches sprouting from its top, recall a fascination with the grotesque that characterized some Japanese avant-garde art of the 1950s and early '60s. Its inspiration: Japan's bombed-out landscape after World War II. Strains of this extreme aesthetic are still visible today in the ghoulish makeup and gestures of butoh dancers. Similarly, Shoko Maemoto creates souvenirs from a nightmare alley where fairy- tale fantasy meets a haunting eroticism. Meticulously executed, her work has a grisly elegance, as in Silent Explosion, 1988, a mannequin-less burlap hoopskirt from which a torrent of "blood" cascades, blazing, to the floor.
Other artists in the show use the real world as raw material. Charred, rough-edged and yellowed, Shinro Ohtake's mixed-media assemblages and collage- filled scrapbooks seek an awkward beauty in combinations of found objects and unwanted rubbish. Such pieces as his Family Tree, 1986-88, serve as vivid symbols of the appropriationist free-for-all that is Japanese pop culture today -- a tsunami of Mickey Mouse trinkets, teriyaki burgers, Picasso calendars, Swatches and more. They are also dispassionate records of life in what Ohtake calls an "information supermarket," an environment in which traditional Japanese cultural values are up for grabs, along with everything else.
This includes Western art history and aspects of Japan's own cultural past. Osaka native Yasumasa Morimura, for example, places himself as the main character in carefully staged and photographed "reproductions" of well-known Western paintings like Manet's Olympia. Tomiaki Yamamoto melds brushy abstract expressionism with the pattern-oriented design sensibility of traditional Japanese textiles. Often his splashy tableaux resemble spread-out kimonos. Typically, as in Untitled, 1985, they are covered with an obsessive, all-over rash of heavily impastoed, drippy dots. Far less theatrical but also keenly focused on subject matter and technique, sculptor Katsura Funakoshi creates blank-faced portraits of everyday people whose looks betray neither race nor nationality. Made from camphorwood, his torsos are as skillfully carved as the ancient Buddhist sculptures whose construction they recall. Psychologically intense, they are also a little bit spooky.
Ultimately, even without the thematic weight imposed on these works by the somewhat arbitrary title "Against Nature," this is very much an exhibition about Japanese artists' continuing tug-of-war with the forces of modernism. Its organizers obviously believe that, in responding to the world around them, today's Japanese artmakers are answering to a personal, not a prescribed, vision of how to depict it. Perhaps, in a modern world, this approach is only natural.