"Wonder-FULL Japan" - A Look at the Work of Kyoto Artist Aoki Muneshima

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WONDER-FULL JAPAN

Aoki Muneshima

Photography = Typhoon

In the gargantuan corpus of Japanese comics, or manga, the pornography genre is in itself massive. Ride the Tokyo subways long enough and you'll eventually see grown men shamelessly poring over sex-graphic narratives.

Walk into any manga shop here and you'll find a dizzying selection of adult comics varying on the tame, extreme, and downright bizarre ( a high school girl has a sexual fantasy of being raped by Santa Claus? Yes, sadly, we've seen it). The images in these books are explicit, though the authors skillfully practice a degree of clever self-censorship with their illustrations.

It's these images and others culled from the iconography of comic books that 23-year-old Kyoto artist Aoki Muneshima uses in a series of installations and 3D art works called "Wonder-FULL Japan." He takes discarded high school lockers and beat-up coin boxes from arcade machines and paints his images on them. A graduate of Kyoto's Zoukei Geijitsu University of the Arts, Muneshima has been creating works like these since his teens.

In the collection's centerpiece, pages torn from porno manga line the insides of a high school locker from top to bottom. A single light bulb glows from inside and beckons the viewer to peek through a rectangular hole cut out from the locker door. Below the aperture, an inscription warns that viewers must be "18 years of age or more." The now-familiar doe-eyed nymphs that are a hallmark of Japanese illustrative style face out from each side of the metal unit, similar to the pictures of skimpily-clad young women on kanban, or "shop signs," in Shinjuku Kabuki-cho, Tokyo's adult entertainment and sex show district.

In another work, the artists uses coin boxes from arcade games, another symbol of male recreation in Japan, and paints ghostly faces of men staring out with hollow expressions, vacuous and creepy.

Muneshima's work reflects a tug-of-war for personal identity. In a nation whose youth have embraced so much that is Western, for better or worse, there are its own unique customs and pop-culture traditions that remain steadfastly part of the coming-of-age experience for the modern young male. Some of them, such as pornographic manga and "game centers," are largely seen as negative influences by parents and educators.

"The idea behind "Wonder-FULL Japan," Muneshima explains, "stems from thinking about the phrase 'Japan is noisy enough.' I liked this phrase, and as I thought about it I thought of how many young Japanese view Japan as a 'bad country,' and the 'bad' things we see around us. Thinking of Japan this way was equal to me feeling like a 'bad person.' But I don't think this is a healthy feeling.

"If you change your perspective, however, you can see the good things in something that looks bad on the outside. I changed my point a view, so I think I have a better understanding of Japan, Japanese people, and how I'm understood in this context."
-YUKA IZUMI + NICHOLAS BLACK