Visions of Tokyo in Japanese Contemporary Art

So many foreigners “experience” tokyo for the first time through the incandescent images of anime movies or the startling pages of cult manga. It is no surprise, then, that visions of Tokyo taken from Japanese contemporary art have been filtered significantly by Japan’s most internationally visible forms of pop culture.1 This, of course, was the strategy adopted with success by Japan’s most famous contemporary artist, Murakami Takashi (b. 1962), as curator and featured artist in his landmark touring shows “Superflat” and “Little Boy.”2 Many Western curators and art publishers have lined up to reproduce this selective vision of contemporary art in Japan.3 (...)

Rebooting migration theory: Interdisciplinarity, globality and postdisciplinarity in migration studies

It is no small ambition to bring together a comprehensive overview of contemporary migration theory across the social sciences and humanities. Such has been the explosion of interest in international migration in the past decade or so that no scholar nowadays can feel adequate when confronting the avalanche of literature that has followed. The rather heroic enterprise presented here has the virtue of letting disciplinary perspectives speak for themselves in a congenial dialogue, rather than attempting a unified theory, the most prominent of which have typically emerged from a base in economic theory (Massey et al. 1998; Hammar et al. 1997). It is thus highly instructive to read each chapter as a guide to the specific mindset of various disciplines toward the subject. Nonspecialists will learn as much about what political scientists, anthropologists, demographers, economists, or lawyers do from reading the respective chapters, as about political science, anthropological, demographic, economic, or legal approaches to migration theory (...)

Compared to its neighbours, open migration to Britain has been a success story

Eastern European migration to the UK is deplored by many Britons. Yet, argues Adrian Favell, comparing Britain’s experience with that of other member states shows just how well it has done out of freedom of movement. The UK has a flexible, well-educated migrant workforce at its disposal – unlike other countries, some of which have lost qualified workers or are struggling to deal with inflows from outside the EU

Tokyo to LA story: how Southern California became the gateway for a Japanese global pop art phenomenon

An analysis of the demographic and geographic conditions that have enabled Los Angeles (LA) to become a gateway for imports of Japanese contemporary cultures in the West, illustrated with the case of Japanese contemporary art, and the international success stories of Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara (...)

The UK has been one of the main beneficiaries from free movement of labour in the EU

Free movement of labour across the EU has become a controversial issue in several European countries, with parties such as UKIP and the Front National calling for restrictions on EU immigration. Adrian Favell writes on the debate over the issue within the UK. He argues that while free movement has generally been portrayed as an ‘immigration’ problem, it should instead be viewed as a set of rights which allow a range of short-term and long-term movements within the EU. He also notes that the UK economy has been particularly well placed to benefit from free movement, with cities like London being among the most attractive destinations for highly skilled workers

The struggle for a page in art history: the global and national ambitions of Japanese contemporary artists from the 1990s'

Although an undifferentiated notion of “global art” in the 1990s and 2000s became the dominant reference point for the evaluation of artists’ careers (Stallabrass 2004, Thornton 2008), it is striking how much a national reference still matters to the generation who emerged as the first wave of properly globalised Japanese contemporary art in the late 80s/early 90s. Even the most globally successful of all, Takashi Murakami, in the end apparently only really cares about securing his page in the Japanese art history textbooks. It is also striking how as yet undecided this struggle is from the point of view of Japanese art history and art criticism. With mention of six key mid-career male artists now at the height of their powers and each with a claim to this prize -- Murakami (b.1962), Yoshitomo Nara (b.1959), Masato Nakamura (b.1963), Yukinori Yanagi (b.1959), Makoto Aida (b.1965) and Tsuyoshi Ozawa (b.1965) -- I will compare and contrast the different role that internationalisation has played in their careers. Each of them has “gone home” in one way another, and each is creating his own “school”. Will there continue to be the need, as Murakami has repeatedly argued in his writings, for the classic strategy of international mobility plus gaisen koen (“triumphant return performance”), to etch their name in history? Or will this prove in fact to be Murakami’s biggest liability? Will market evaluation, curatorial discourse, critical prestige, academic influence, museum popularity, or social/community impact decide the contest? And how much of this art historical struggle is still contained within the internal national art system, and how much of it is truly global (or regional) in its dynamics

The Changing Face of ‘Integration’ in a Mobile Europe

Amidst the rising tide of anti-immigration across all of Europe – which now includes Eastern and Southern Europeans as much as familiar targets such as Muslims or undocumented Africans – there has been little questioning of the dominant mainstream progressive response to the consequences of migration: that ‘integration’ is the best and most realistic solution for nations now having to accommodate the populations who have moved into or around Europe during the past two highly mobile decades of the 1990s and 2000s (...)

Visions of Neo-Tôkyô:Culture pop dans l'art contemporain japonais

La plupart des étrangers découvrent Tôkyô pour la première fois dans les images colorées des anime, ou dans les étonnantes pages des manga. Il n’est alors pas surprenant que beaucoup des représentations de Tôkyô dans l’art contemporain japonais empruntent aux formes les plus visibles de la culture populaire japonaise. C’est évidemment la stratégie adoptée avec succès par l’artiste contemporain japonais le plus connu, Takashi Murakami, à la fois curateur et artiste pour ses expositions Superflat et Little Boy. C’est aussi la tendance qu’ont suivie de nombreux commissaires d’exposition et éditeurs de livres d’art occidentaux en reproduisant cette vision sélective de l’art contemporain japonais

Bye Bye Little Boy

It is just six years since the Japan Society in New York put on Takashi Murakami’s “Little Boy” exhibition, a stylish sampling and remix of Japanese contemporary art produced since the early 1990s. Acting as curator and star of his own show, Japan’s best-known contemporary artist put pedophilic images on pristine white walls and plastic elephants and dung in Central Park. The catalogue he edited is a DIY sociology of postwar Japan as reflected by comic strips and the culture of sci-fi obsessed otaku (nerds). The Japan Society had a smash hit on its hands, riding a wave of neo-Japonisme that for a while made manga, anime and J-pop the hippest things in town. No one stopped to wonder if Murakami’s selection was representative and good enough, or indeed if his clever packaging of Japan wasn’t really all just © MURAKAMI, as his later world-touring solo retrospective was called (...)