NEW YORK, NY.- A monster tsunami uproots a city. Modern tough guys lock samurai-style in battle. Candy-colored streams of animals and flowers hyper-pixilate. These dramatic visual moments are among those to be encountered in Garden of Unearthly Delights: Works by Ikeda, Tenmyouya & teamLab at the Japan Society Gallery from October 10, 2014 to January 11, 2015.

The intricate allegorical paintings, installation, and digital works on view were created by three artistic visionaries who are shaping Japanese art and culture today: Manabu Ikeda, Hisashi Tenmyouya, and the art and technology collective teamLab. Each tackles urgent cultural and social issues in a manner informed by today’s spectacle and information overload. But each also harkens back to the Japanese tradition of the master craftsmen, takumi, in the level of technical precision and detail they bring to the creation of complex, bravura fantasies.

“Going against the grain of the attention-deficit present, each of these artists fully exploits their medium, whether it be pen, paint, or software, to take the viewer into a realm of immersion and invite a methodical exploration of pictorial delicacies,” says Miwako Tezuka, Director of Japan Society Gallery. Dr. Tezuka and the independent curator Laura J. Mueller are the co-curators of the exhibition.

Garden of Unearthly Delights comprises 25 works of art. Manabu Ikeda alone is represented by 12 paintings and an etching, which is an unprecedented gathering for this artist, who produces at a very measured rate. To help viewers navigate the array of allusions in these densely layered works of art, the exhibition also features contextual works, ranging from ephemera, including an 80s paperback edition of Nausicaä in the Valley of the Wind, the Japanese post-apocalyptic fantasy illustrated by Hayao Miyazaki, to master ukiyo-e prints and a hanging scroll painting by the Edo-period artist Itō Jakuchū.

Manabu Ikeda
Foretoken (2008), a monumental painting of a towering tsunami uprooting and devouring skyscrapers, trees, trains, cars and people, is a highlight of Garden of Unearthly Delights. Created by the 41-year-old Manabu Ikeda, originally from Saga Prefecture and now based in Tokyo, the work will be displayed for the first time since the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011, which it seemed to foreshadow. While the work shadows Hokusai’s iconic image of a great wave, the cautionary message evident in Foretoken brings to mind the early Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch and the power and magnitude of his The Garden of Earthly Delights. This modern-day Boschian artist, however, draws with a Tachikawa Comic Nib Fountain Pen, a finely tipped pen favored by manga artists, and considers the legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki, co-founder of the famed Studio Ghibli, his inspiration.

Ikeda’s affinity for Miyazaki’s oeuvre is apparent in another painting on view, Meltdown (2013), where a gentle palette of warm greens and blues belies the artist’s message: in this dystopian missive, humankind seems to be hurtling downhill with the momentum of a giant boulder. However, a careful viewing of his work reveals many details that suggest potential regenerative power of man and nature. The value of coexistence is something that Ikeda inherits subconsciously from the epic manga and anime works of Miyazaki.

Ikeda is now participating in the residency at Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin, creating a large work that would require three years to complete.

Hisashi Tenmyouya
Another exhibition centerpiece is Rhyme (2012), a room installation created by the 48-year-old Hisashi Tenmyouya. Dominating the space is the artist’s large-scale painting of close combat by adversaries mounted on horse and foot, wielding swords and spears and assuming an incredible number of fighting poses. Rhyme echoes battle scenes painted by Renaissance artists Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Paolo Uccello, except that the action is set very graphically and boldly on a gilded background, as in classical Japanese screen paintings, and more than 30 different versions of the same pale, retro-yakuza tough guy, dressed only in a loincloth, replace Italian noblemen, mercenaries, and centaurs.

Tenmyouya’s luscious gold panorama hangs side by side with its exact mirror opposite (in the form of a large-scale digital print). One "real," the other a "copy," the pair dominates a surreal Zen dry garden where, rather than traditional stones, pebbles and white sand, black volcanic rocks and skulls lie planted in a sea of red sand.

Hisashi Tenmyouya began his career as an art director of a record company. As his passion toward fine art grew, he decided to become a full-time professional artist. As a self-trained artist, he mastered various techniques of Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) that mainly utilizes paper and mineral pigments. However, Tenmyouya updates the classicism of Nihonga by incorporating contemporary motifs and issues as well as elements of street culture, result of which he proclaims as a new genre of art, that is, Neo Nihonga. In this new genre, East and West merge, and the works espouse critical thinking of society and contemporary world affairs. The aesthetic of Neo Nihonga might appear incongruent to Japanese simplicity and austerity exemplified by wabi, sabi, and Zen aesthetic; however, Tenmyouya believes in the continuation of an alternative aesthetic vein throughout Japanese history that celebrates extreme flamboyance and rebellious attitude. He terms this alternative approach "BASARA," roughly meaning "eccentric."

Dr. Tezuka adds that the artist “is aiming to extract the essence of classical Japanese art, while feeling free to experiment with materials, form, and subject matter.” The value of this approach can be seen in three other featured paintings by Tenmyouya, which surprisingly transform Buddhist iconography.

“A striking commonality in the work of Ikeda, Tenmyouya and teamLab is that rather than shun the seemingly restrictive artistic traditions of Japanese art, they embrace and revitalize them, creating a dynamic, contemporary Japanese identity for the global now,” says Laura Mueller. “In a contemporary world of continual news feeds and instantaneous messaging that bombard us with images, these three artists create works of art that require us to stop and contemplate the shared experience and greatly reward us for our effort.”

teamLab
Garden of Unearthly Delights sheds light on teamLab, an influential collaborative established 13 years ago in Tokyo, now comprising some 300 individuals from the areas of art, design, computer engineering, mathematics and beyond. Toshiyuki Inoko, considered “Japan’s Steve Jobs,” is the charismatic founder and creative director of teamLab, which collectively realizes his vision of unlimited creative potential via digital media. Teamlab’s large-scale digital projection mappings and installations are notable for drawing inspiration from traditional Japanese art.

A new interactive, digital media projection piece by teamlab will make its world debut in Garden of Unearthly Delights. Two other works—United, Fragmented, Repeated, and Impermanent World (2013) and Life Survives by the Power of Life (2011)—will be exhibited for the first time in the United States in the showing.

United, Fragmented, Repeated, and Impermanent World, a colorful garden scene abundantly filled with real and fantastical animals depicted across a span of eight high-definition monitors, is based on Birds, Animals, and Flowering Plants, an 18th-century pair of six-panel folding screens created by the so-called “Edo eccentric,” Itō Jakuchū. This artist is often credited with inventing masume-gaki (grid painting), an unusual method whereby paintings were created by filling in hundreds of thousands of grids with different colors, like mosaics. In United, Fragmented, Repeated, and Impermanent World, a viewer’s movement changes the work, which mirrors her shape as she moves, so that she literally becomes part of a digitally rendered, otherworldly vision and also part of a change in the real world.