The Prescription Inside The Nightmare
In 2000, the Superflat catalog published by Madora publishing contained the following sentence: “In the future, the whole world may be like Japan.” Yes, a world where right and wrong hold no reality. A world with no understanding of the difference between righteousness and evil, drawn in lurid colors, where the desire for erotic experience, filtered by censorship, is the only balm for the experience of being human. A world where people are resigned to faux-democracy and dance to the tune of outside influences. This is the reality Japan has faced after losing the war. Forced to mimic the actions of larger nations, Japan is the future of more than half of the countries on the globe and people should view the sense of beauty it has constructed over the years as an image of what is to come. It was this cynical message that I meant to coney with those words.
Time has passed and it is now 2012. Japan is in the midst of an unparalleled catastrophe. The radiation effects felt from the disabled nuclear plant in Fukushima is the not-so-distant fate of the hundreds of nuclear plants around the globe. With no economic growth, increasing lifespan, and significant concern about its production capacity, this nation is living in a nightmare.
Post-war Japan has been chasing the faith passed down to us from America, the idea that all our dreams will come true. That faith has been the source of our attempts at capitalism and the sharing of American values. However our obsession with dreams has given birth to an abstract perspective on life and prompted an unnatural bloating of the popular mind. The nightmare that swirls around us is twice, thrice layered. And yet… we must continue living. We must find sources of hope. We must find the strength to internalize the nightmare and then laugh it away in self-mockery. The solace that otaku have always created in beauty is now needed by the rest of the world. This exhibition is an embodiment of that idea.
– First published in the June issue of Bijutsu Techo
