The exhibit “Joyful Painting: Pictures of Japanese Artists of the 1990s” has been launched in the National Museum of Arts within the framework of the Month of Japan in Ukraine-2010. It has traveled over half of the world during the past decade. The last decade of the 20th century is represented by 28 works by nine modern, highly-appreciated Japanese artists. These include, in particular, Takashi Murakami, the third most expensive artist in the world known for his cooperation with the Louis Vuitton fashion house.
“The artists whose works are on display grew in the period when Japan reached a high level of economic growth and felt to the full the process of abrupt changes that were taking place in the country. They discovered a new side to the art of painting, which was then considered the ‘dead’ form, after the baptism of formalism, and liberated it from the narrow limits of ‘art.’ Their aim is to make painting an open space for individual communication,” art critic Okabe Miki says in his preface to the exhibit’s catalog. “They turned to the styles and topics of genre painting of the 18th and 19th centuries, and American figurative painting in theperiod of establishing formalism. They also used the typical elements of comics and book illustration, as they wished, similarly to other contemporary Japanese artists, to enter the history of art as style-fusionists,” the art critic Matsui Midori says in the preface to the catalog, “The Japanese artists are prompted by an even greater need to develop an individual style through comprehending that the modernization of Japanese painting of the late 19th century was not complete. The attributes mentioned here are the result of a struggle between the inherited artists’ obligation to reveal their purely Japanese identity and their need for internationalization.”
The exhibit will remain open until October 17.







