"High" and "Low" "Cute Art" Comparison

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Good thing it was Earth: Rei Sato



Image from the KaikaiKiki website, artwork created by Rei Sato. Image maybe found at this link.

Unexpected Faces are the loose theme here.

Rei Sato's work on the KaiKaiKiKi website concentrate on photographs with ink and gel pen faces floating on the surface of the images, inserting ghostly lines into apparent snap shots. The sacred space of the photograph, of art, is trespassed through child-like scrawling that looks at first glance more like graffiti intruding on the photograph's face. Whether or not the photograph is made by Rei Sato, or taken from different negatives, or just found--because her drawings own the image and add ghostly figures transparent to the context. In terms of Murakami's 'Flat', the picture plane becomes disharmonious.

The night sky's blending of colour would normally create this sense of extensive depth and realty of some beautiful landscape, but the ink lines emphasize the reality of the photograph's literal plane of flatness. This disruption of the fakery of space brings in a tension between how we have been taught to accept the reality of the photographic plane and the reality of the object itself. In a way the drawings ignore the photograph's content, including the usual composition of such a picture plane and the way the sideways image splits the photograph's content in half.

The bright white eyes pop against the darkness, and the title informs the interpretation of the earth. "Good thing it was the Earth," the title goes, and this implies some sort of potential tragedy that's been narrowly escaped. Yet the figures smile--the earth beams, but the girl/boy face glance away with a shy smile. Here lays the potential 'cute', perhaps--the wide, bright eyes, the large forehead and bulbous shape of the girl. The manner of the drawings also evoke childhood with the apparent simplicity and lack of structure in the forms to imitate 'reality'. Instead, it depends on just very disjointed symbols of 'people' or 'identity' of the eye an the mouth and remain perfectly readable even though they appear overtly simplistic. This simplicity, however, is also part of the cute--looking for the child forms and the child products, reducing symbols down below the uncanny valley and distance them from actual human form. The naive quaintness of our childhood drawings on the fridge push against the aesthetic beauty of the photograph (photos being adult objects because of the expense and complexity of the device) and evoke this distant yearning dream-space of child hood.





The above image is taken courtesy of Mainichi Bento from the March 2009 posts, a Japanese website run by a woman who teaches people about creative bento techniques and every day uploads either and image of the bento she's made that day, usually for her young child, or other photos relevant to her day.

Bento-Cute has it's own presence in culture, with a multitude of products designed for the purpose of creating cute faces and forms out of food for the purpose of lunches. Especially when aimed for children, products are often brightly decorated with characters, and there are the many books about how to create 'cute food'. This woman is one of the people who are a part of this greater system.

The visual systems associated with the different times of year are drawn on here with the smiling sakura blossom (this being the time for hanami), such an ever present symbol within the visual lexicon in Japan that in spring it appears everyone. That's not to mention the historic high culture poetry connection, the fetishized Japan imagery and so on that the sakura appear within. Fresh foods and bright colour create an attractive combination, and the faces are perfect examples of the 'cute' of the kyara, or chara, as has been described earlier--reduced features with emphasized eyes and a need to be taken care of. The fact this is meant to be eaten is not as important as the visual deliciousness where the idea of cute as consumer object becomes literally. Bright colors are devoured by both eyes and mouth as indications of freshness and youth. The time put into the creation of these bento are also a status marker of a mother who has time and skill to give her children delicious and appealing food, which also serves the purpose of encouraging the children to eat food they may not otherwise find appealing. The effort of creating bento thus carries a status marker (often female associated), which is compounded by the 'cute' factor that can be easily connected to the idea of woman, womanhood, and the skills of the household.