Artwork from Takashi Murakami at the Hong Kong art fair 2010
Sailor Moon (1992 – 1997) transcended Japanese anime and reached a pure state of corrosiveness. Sailor Moon is an artificial flavouring substance: depthless, highly satisfying and addictive. It is more than any artwork of Takashi Murakami the best illustration of his superflat art movement, depicting “the shallow emptiness of Japanese consumer culture”. The original manga is a little different from the anime and somehow more spiritual. The anime version expunged its scenario of any particularity, leading to the ultimate stereotype of the Japanese girl, flanked with kitsch accessories ready for merchandising, cheap love stories and consumerist lifestyles. The characters were designed as for any animes to appeal both to girls and perverts thanks to a quota of ‘subliminal’ underwear scenes. Their transformations into self-centred wonder women are the climax of every episodes (otherwise rather mediocre in their drawings). The same scenes of transformations are shown again and again, becoming objects of cult, obsessing and hypnotic. They saturate the narrative with their superflat symbolic.
Walt Disney Studios in Paris opened last year a new section called “Toy Story Playland”, which will also be launched soon in Disneyland Hong Kong. The area features a series of rides designed for children and based on the characters of the Toy Story franchise: RC Racer, Slinky Dog ZigZag Spin and Toy Soldiers Parachute Drop. Why choosing Toy Story for a new section of a theme park instead of the many other Disney franchises? There are many good reasons to pick it up, such as its popularity and the obvious merchandising opportunities of its toys. I would like to speculate here one more reason that might have led to that choice. Disney did consciously or not a very subtle cultural exercise in promoting cars, consumerism and the American army, in a politically correct way of course.
Play Time (1967) by Jacques Tati is a relatively unknown movie. It is a more than two hours long and highly sophisticated visual comedy with nearly no dialogues, which probably explains why it wasn’t a big success in the box office. The film is however the best criticism of modern society that I have ever seen, and is still very relevant today. It is also a sharp criticism on modern architecture, both capturing the ideals of modernism and pointing at its delusiveness.
The Hermitage is a massive residential property under construction in Kowloon (Hong Kong). I was living just next to its location, so I could see the progress of its development and I was very intrigued by the inside. Few weeks ago, I was walking in the adjacent Olympian shopping mall and I discovered that The Hermitage opened its showroom to the public. It went beyond all my expectations and was by far the craziest thing I have seen during my stay in Hong Kong, The showroom is completely out of reality, immersing visitors into a manufactured ‘dream’-like experience.
