Superflat
In 2000, Takashi Murakami opened the Superflat exhibition at Parco in Shibuya. It toured the United States the following year, including MOCA in Los Angeles. His argument: the flatness of Japanese manga and anime did not appear out of nowhere — it extends a flatness Japanese painting had carried all along. He drew a single line connecting ukiyo-e all the way to anime. Warhol's studio system and the Edo-period painter's workshop shake hands here. This is the direct sea route between this map and the ANIME MAP. Flat carries two meanings at once here. One is the flatness of the picture plane. The other is the absence of any step between high art and popular culture. And the core of Murakami's argument is not simply that things are flat: it is that on a flat surface the eye never settles on one point, so what is drawn appears to start moving — the latent motion folded inside flatness. The case was built across three exhibitions: Superflat (2000, Parco Gallery, Shibuya), Coloriage (2002, Fondation Cartier, Paris), and Little Boy (2005, Japan Society Gallery, New York). That last title is the name of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Postwar Japanese subculture grew out of what happened then — the exhibition said it that plainly. It received the best-exhibition award from the International Association of Art Critics. He took the thing Japan looked down on most and carried it out into the world, then explained it with the heaviest name available. Here the Japanese bands of this map catch up, for now, with the present.