With only a few, yet prominent, artistic outlooks the exhibition presents Japanese art of recent years. The transition from the brash Manga generation to an era returning to subtler qualities of presentation supplies the conceptual thread. Yoshitomo Nara, in his pictures and installations, portrays the crumbling of the baby face template in view of enormous social pressures. In Japan, after the setting in of the economic boom a new, in many ways ruptured self-consciousness has spread, since the mid 1990ies, reflected by the visual arts that find themselves caught between media worlds saturated with pathos and restrained expressions of intimate injuries. Midori Mitamura creates spaces in which authentic set pieces from her own biography serve what amounts to an oppressive questioning of family values. For years, throughout the opening hours of exhibitions, Takahiro Suzuki has been writing a single Kanji (calligraphic sign) over and over: "ikiroo" - live! The heightened aggression and the cramped conditions of life in the large cities finally form the base of Taiyo Kimura's works in which the vulnerability of the individual among the crowd often is looked at with a sense of black humour.

catalogue

Sponsoren: Der Kunstraum Innsbruck, Verein zur Ausstellung aktueller Kunst, wird unterstützt von Stadt Innsbruck, Land Tirol, Bundeskanzleramt Sektion Kunst, Tourismusverband Innsbruck und seine Feriendörfer und für das BesucherInnenservice vom Land Tirol. Der Kunstraum Innsbruck ist Ö1-Club-Partner.