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How the nuclear disaster roused Japan’s artists
Mar 10th 2012 | TOKYO

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IN JAPAN there is no kudos in going to jail for your art. Bending the rules, let alone
breaking them, is largely taboo. That was one reason Toshinori Mizuno was terrified asJohn Henry was a type­setting man:
When newspaper compositors were...

he worked undercover at the Fukushima Dai­ichi nuclear­power plant, trying to get theProspero | Mar 30th, 15:36

shot (pictured) that shows him in front of the mangled third reactor holding up a referee's
red card. He was also terrified of the radiation, which registered its highest reading where
he took the photograph. The only reason he did not arouse suspicion, he says, isbecause he was in regulation radiation kit. And in Japan people rarely challenge a man inuniform.
Mr Mizuno is part of ChimPom, a six­person collective of largely unschooled artists who
have spent a lot of time getting into tight spots since the disaster, and are engagingly
thoughtful about the results. Twice they have used the off­limits Dai­ichi plant as a canvas
for strikingly daring video art or photography. Once, they attached a painting of its
smouldering wreckage to a famous Taro Okamoto anti­nuclear mural, “The Myth ofDaily chart: Donkey skins are the newivory
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Tomorrow”. Vandals they are not; they say they peeled it off a day later.
It is easy to dismiss ChimPom's work as a publicity stunt.
But the artists' actions speak at least as loudly as theirimages. There is a logic to their seven years of guerrilla artthat has become clearer since the nuclear disaster of March
11th 2011. In fact, Noi Sawaragi, a prominent art critic, says
they may be hinting at a new direction in Japanesecontemporary art.

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Godzilla’s grandchildren

Radiation and nuclear annihilation have suffused Japan's
subculture since the film “Gojira” (the Japanese Godzilla) inReprints

1954. The two themes crop up repeatedly in manga and2 Daily chart: Americans are richer than they wereanime cartoons. Over the past decade or so Takashi

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Murakami, Japan's best­known artist, has explored consumerism and the fetishisation ofin the 1970sstruggles with partisan redistricting

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highlight the mindless Utopianism of Japanese shopping culture. Mushrooms andmushroom clouds are frequent motifs and he recently travelled to Qatar to unveil a 100­
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ChimPom confronts Mr Murakami's consumerist concerns, at times head­on. One of theirworks, “I'm BOKAN” (2007), obliquely refers to his collaboration with Louis Vuitton, which
included decorating its ubiquitous handbags with the Japanese artist's bright and instantly
recognisable marks. ChimPom took some Louis Vuitton bags to Cambodia and blewthem up using cleared landmines. The message to Japan was that conflict exists,
however cute things might seem back home.
In 2008 they used a plane's exhaust fumes to mark the sky over Hiroshima with the word
“Pika” for the flash an atom bomb makes in manga. They were pilloried for what wasseen as an insult to the victims of the tragedy and grovelled in apology. But they also
explained that they were reminding the public of what was often forgotten in Japan's
subculture: that the nuclear threat was real, not a figment of an otherworldly imagination.

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ChimPom says it pays homage to Mr Murakami, but its work has moved on. As Mr
Sawaragi puts it, Superflat largely reflected the culture of stability during the “bubbleyears” until the early 1990s (the bubble was not just economic; it was also one of“imaginary reality”). ChimPom questions that stability itself. “Their work is not flat. They
are trying to question and discuss what was invisible in the Superflat society,” he says.
Other young artists are ploughing similar ground. Kota Takeuchi, for instance, secretly
took a job at Fukushima Dai­ichi and is recorded pointing an angry finger at the camerathat streams live images of the site. Later he used public news conferences to pressure
Tepco, operator of the plant, about the conditions of its workers inside. His work, like
ChimPom's, blurs the distinction between art and activism.
Japanese political art is unusual and the new subversiveness could be a breath of fresh
air; if only anyone noticed. The ChimPom artists have received scant coverage in thehttps://www.economist.com/node/21549913

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stuffy arts pages of the national newspapers; mostly they are treated as part of adelinquent fringe. The group held just one show of Mr Mizuno's reactor photographs inJapan. He says: “The timing has not been right. The media will just want to make thework look like a crime.”• This article appeared in the Books and arts section of the print edition

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