Photo by Florian Kleinefenn. © 2008 Mr./Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd., all rights reserved

Mr., Perfectly Armed! (2008). Acrylic on canvas, 59 in. diameter

December 2008 Reviews

Street Art, Street Life

Third Guangzhou Trennial

Charles Avery

Swoon

Martin Ramirez

Richard Kern

Colin Chillag

The Greenroom

Bending the Word

Robert Motherwell

I Am Never At Home

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The Japanese artist known as Mr. has built his reputation on a well-developed Lolita complex. In this show, titled "Nobody Dies," his happy-go-lucky nymphets come to life in a 37-minute, 34-second film he wrote and cast with real actresses. The film, which shares the show's title and was produced by Takashi Murakami (to whose art collective, Kaikai Kiki, Mr. belongs), is shown alongside photographs and Mr.'s anime-style acrylic paintings; in Nobody Dies (2008), a team of five pretty schoolgirls play war games in the woods with BB-loaded rifles, and retreat to bedrooms filled with pink gingham and teddy bears. The paintings, realized with painstaking detail, are less overtly sexual than the artist's earlier works, portray-ing cartoon girls firing weapons on a snow-covered field, standing in the candy section of the supermarket, or wrestling (suggestively) in the grass. One canvas shows its adolescent subject perched high on a window ledge, overlooking the rooftops of Tokyo. Normally this would be a terrifying place to be, but in Mr.'s world of pubescent potency, it's a thrill.

The artist's own role is ambiguous — earnest or ironic, a pedophile staging his fantasies, a creator visiting his muse. His camera zooms in on the actresses' body parts like a leering eye, and he himself shows up in the film as an inept policeman who is teased by the girls. He appears in one painting, too, as a Peeping Tom spying on a sleeping child. Throughout, Mr.'s work examines the contradic-tions and obsessions of various Japanese subcultures, from preadolescent sexuality (whether innocent or intentional) to the video game-inspired bloodlust of giggling teenagers. Submachine guns are studded with rhinestones, and camouflage outfits come in an impractical bright pink. It's awfully cute — and just a little disturbing.

"Mr." originally appeared in the December 2008 / January 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' December 2008 / January 2009 Table of Contents.