ROANOKE, VA.- Painting for Joy: New Japanese Painting in the 1990s, a worldwide touring exhibition organized by the Japan Foundation and the Consulate General of Japan in Atlanta, will open to the public tomorrow at the Art Museum of Western Virginia. The exhibition will remain on view through December 31, 2007.

The Art Museum has been instrumental in transforming the Roanoke Valley as the cultural center of western Virginia,” said Ralph Smith, senator-elect of the state Senate district 22. Painting for Joy: New Japanese Painting in the 1990s will provide yet another window on the world, bringing two great cultures together.”

Painting for Joy: New Japanese Painting in the 1990s features the work of nine artists who were born in the 1960s and came into prominence in the 1990s: Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Makoto Aida, Yoshitaka Echizenya, Takanobu Kobayashi, Taro Chiezo, Nobuhiko Nukata, Miran Fukuda, and Naofumi Maruyama. These artists helped to bring about a rejuvenation of contemporary Japanese painting during the final decade of the twentieth century. They consciously sought an alternative to the existing artistic heritages of Japan which they perceived as traditional or conservative and, by doing so, established their own individualist, post-modern styles. Their works appropriate popular themes from mass media and pop culture – especially Japanese animation and comic graphic stories.

Dynax America Corporation, TM GE Automation Systems, Inc., Yokohama Tire Corporation, the City of Roanoke, and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation are contributing sponsors of Painting for Joy: New Japanese Painting in the 1990s. In-kind support is provided by Idearc Media and WDBJ7 Television. Additional support is provided by JTEKT Automotive Virginia, Inc. and The Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership.

“We are thrilled to support Painting for Joy: New Japanese Painting in the 1990s and to have the occasion to honor the contributions of Japanese artists,” said Masaki Motomura, executive vice president of Dynax America Corporation. “We hope that the exhibition and related programs will foster a great awareness of and appreciation for Japanese culture.”

“Yokohama Tire Corporation is pleased to be a sponsor of this exciting exhibition,” said Tadashi Suzuki, plant manager for Yokohama. “We are delighted to make it possible for the public to have the exciting opportunity to experience contemporary Japanese art through Painting for Joy: New Japanese Painting for the 1990s right here in western Virginia.”

About the Artists - Through his works, Takashi Murakami has played with oppositions in East and West, past and present and high art and low culture while remaining consistently amusing and accessible. His work morphs the world of popular contemporary Japanese cartoons and historic Japanese painting. Murakami championed the Superflat theory, which denotes a flattened surface, the working environment of computer graphics, flat panel monitors, or the forceful integration of data into an image. Murakami’s theory questions the two-dimensional nature of Japanese society, customs, art, and culture. His work has been exhibited in prestigious museums all over the world, including a recently-opened show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and a solo retrospective at the Bard College Museum of Art. In 2003, Murakami partnered with Louis Vuitton to create the acclaimed Monogram Multicolore line of handbags.

Tokyo-based artist Yoshitomo Nara creates deceptively simple paintings, sculptures and drawings that invite us to reconnect with the defiant spirit that comes with youthful optimism and the belief that we may someday be able to change the world. Like the punk rock music that

inspires him, Nara’s work emerges out of the despair of feeling invisible in a world where it seems like “nothing ever happens”. His characters are devilish, fairy-tale strange, and not afraid to embrace the experiences of anxiety or fear and escape into fantasy. The children and animals that populate Nara’s works are wise beyond their years. Direct gazes, knowing expressions and mischievous grins confirm the fact that, although adorable, these children know what the world has in store for them. While he is considered a cult figure in his native Japan, his works appeal to a range of generations and nationalities. Around the world, his characteristic style has become a symbol for the idiosyncratic individual who marches to the beat of his or her own drum.

Makota Aida, one of Japan’s most diverse and controversial artists, has exhibited widely in museums and biennales around the world. His work is represented in the collections of the Japan Foundation, the Hiroshima City Museum for Contemporary Art, and the Tokyo Municipal Museum of Art. Aida may be best known for his disturbing “Nihonga” paintings. In 2003, Aida attracted considerable notoriety when his painting A Picture of an Air Raid on New York City (1996) was included in the American Effect exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art.

Yoshitaka Echizenya currently lives and works in Chiba. His artwork often deals with human instinct, recognition and beliefs. The atmosphere that is depicted in Echizenya’s paintings, more than the scene itself, seems to convey the passing of time. We do not feel that time has stopped --- but rather beyond the painting that it has been running for a long time, and will continue to do so from now on.

Takanobu Kobayashi’s subjects are mostly mundane items taken from his everyday life – a bathtub, a pillow, cutlery and crockery, a microwave oven, cars, buses, tuk tuks – that he paints with little or no background information to clutter the pictures. He is inspired by things or creatures which seem to have an otherworldly aura, and he works to make that explicit. His paintings manage to bring so much presence to objects not normally seen to possess much in the way of visual appearance. His aim is to describe the relationship he has with his subject matter, working to evolve what he has termed “new Nihonga” in reference to the traditional Japanese painting style that flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His work is not strictly realist, since the images are meant to contain the magical sensation of the artist’s encounter within the pictorial frame without evoking the viewer’s personal memory.

Taro Chiezo is one of perhaps a dozen Japanese visual artists who have made a name for themselves overseas in the last decade. His success can be attributed to his ability to detach himself from Japan’s culture, make an analysis of Japanese social trends, and then caricature these trends artistically for a western audience. Japanimation is combined with classic American abstract techniques in Chiezo’s works, which use a bright fluorescent palette to question the status of painting itself in a world overrun with computer-generated imagery. Chiezo paints life-sized depictions of computer simulated anime images as a parody of historical portraiture. Painting Japanese cartoon characters from various sites on the internet in oil on a large scale critiques the mindlessly optimistic consumer culture which produced them.

For 15 years, Nobuhiko Nukata has been painting latticed cubes against a monochrome background, using only his hand and a brush (without rulers or masking tape) to create large geometric pictures. At first glance, the works look like they were created either on a drafting table or a computer. While the action used to create the lines seems mechanical, the artist wants to make the viewer conscious of the tension between the background space and the foreground shapes.

Miran