MR.: INVOKE IT AND A FLOWER SHALL BLOSSOM
Perrotin presents Invoke It and a Flower Shall Blossom the eighth exhibition of Mr. with the gallery. The show displays a new series of paintings and shaped canvas, two sculptures and a set of works on paper.
January 20 – March 2, 2024
Starting out as Murakami’s assistant, Mr. has become an ambassador for otaku, a Japanese term for people who are obsessively absorbed invideo games and anime, primarily online. Roughly translated as “geek” or “nerd,” it has the same disparaging connotation. Mr. works in a wide range of media, including painting, watercolor, sculpture, installation, film, and photography – all of which reflect his passion for contemporary Japanese popular aesthetics.
Most of his works are portraits of teenage girls with the typical features of anime characters large eyes highlighted in pink, slightly upturned noses that gradually disappear, mobile mouths, closed or gaping, and attractive outfits that range from school uniforms to colorful Kawaii fashion. The girls are often at the center of the works, surrounded by pixelated figures from video games, everyday objects, and Latin and Sino-Japanese typography. Despite their ambiguity – to which we’ll return later – for a European observer, these nymphets are symbols of Japanese soft power. They also evoke the sultry prints of the Edo period known as shunga, even though their eroticism is much more discreet, even latent.
Despite championing otaku, Mr. never completely locks himself away. His work is also influenced by Western urban subcultures, particularly graffiti, which shares many key characteristics with otaku. Both are associated with youth culture, “geekiness,” and male marginality and separateness, often facing incomprehension and rejection.
Although not a frequent practitioner of graffiti, Mr. has clearly adopted its ethical and aesthetic codes. For instance, he uses a quintessentially Anglo-Saxon pseudonym – a nod to Shigeo Nagashima, the famous baseball player nicknamed Mister Giants – showing his desire to transcend Japanese borders and place otaku subculture on a global stage.
The urban universe is another leitmotif of Mr.’s work. In some paintings and installations, his accumulations echo the overabundance of signs and visual stimuli that characterize big cities. In others, Mr. is more directly concerned with the materiality of urban space: on gray, textured backgrounds, on panels and fences, he creates a palimpsest of drawings, signs, numbers, and writing that evoke the interrupted dialogue of the street, between advertising logorrhea and graffiti rejoinders.
Mr.’s references to urban culture also shed new light on the melancholic undertones of his work. In line with the Superflat movement, the artist embraces a darker side, reflecting the complexity of the Japanese psyche, haunted by the Second World War and the persistence of the nuclear threat. For him, this fear seems to find expression and relief in the figure of the young girl, which he repeats to the point of obsession. In his shaped canvases and sculptures, as well as in his paintings, Mr.’s nymphettes appear in a variety of outfits, from the most sober to the most colorful, an apparent reference to cosplay culture.