Many people scoff at pop art and 'design' as below the notice of serious academicians. I won't take up that debate. However, I would like to humbly call my reader's attention to the work of Yusuke Nakamura. The reader may be familiar with a Japanese alt-rock band called Asian Kung Fu Generation; Nakamura is to AKFG what Stanley Donwood was to Radiohead. I first noticed Nakamura's work when I watched the anime Tatami Galaxy. I don't know if Nakamura had anything to do with the character design or the promotional art, but it sure looks like his style, and the soundtrack is AKFG.
Anyway, I feel that Nakamura effectively combines two five-year fads: vector art (perfect example: Mad men intro; taken to an extreme in the Daniel Craig bomb, Renaissance) and that scratched-in-ink indie style that seems to dominate all pretentious cover art of the past decade (defines the genre: the Juno title sequence; but google-image 'indie art' and you will know exactly what I'm talking about). The former style exhausts the power of simplicity with overuse; one could almost see its antithesis in the ornate, Art Nouveau-cum-inkscrawl that is the latter style. This self-important blogger thinks these two styles are obnoxiously overused.However Arigatosan gives Nakamura a free pass. Why? There's an ingrediant X. The exquisite stylization and potency of the lines justifies the pared down colors and forms, and there is a wonderful interplay between pattern and solid, detail and contour. One could claim that there are plenty of graphic artists out there working in similar styles--that Nakamura is part of a larger scene. But his art is consistently so appealing that I think he excels among the rest.
One is reminded of the high-points of woodblock printing: Utamaro's sweeping definition of the female form; of the bold blues and reds of Hokusai. Most of all, one sees those indefinable qualities that give Aubrey Beardsley and Harry Clarke's work its dark and enduring fascination.
Feast your eyes:
Okay, so I was starting to feel like I was stretching it a bit with that last paragraph. But then I came across this...
... And this...
And so, this excitable commentator has a proclamation to make: Nakamura's art is a delirious confluence of ukiyo-e, art nouveau, and anime--three of the most powerful forms of pop art over the past century. Arigato-san tips her hat.
Readers should keep in mind that 19th-century block-prints like Ukiyo-e and Western book illustrations were not considered art until recently; Hiroshige prints used to be the equivalent of postcards or posters--cheap decoration. Graphic design like that of Yusuke Nakamura is similarly considered mundane and pedestrian now, but a century from now it could hold the same canon status as Ukiyo-e. Just food for thought.
A final note: there is a strange contrast that strikes me every day I walk the streets of Tokyo: grungy or uninteresting buildings housing consistently fashionable people. Minato has plenty of shiny skyscrapers (e.g. the Grand Prince hotel, a few blocks from my apt). But hundreds of dingy hovels lie tucked among these megaliths (e.g., my apartment building ^_^). Little sidestreets wind through the city, abutting sprawling motorways; there is little separating the pristine from the derelict. I really like how certain Nakamura pieces highlight this in stark monochrome.
This particular locale pretty closely resembles my street:
