Friday, July 29, 2016

What Is Kawaii?

What Is Kawaii?

The Japanese concept of kawaiibest translated as “cuteness”—has grown from a national trend to a global phenomenon. Sanrio’s Hello Kitty has been valued at $7 billion; the Oxford English Dictionary named an emoji its 2015 Word of the Year; and Nintendo’s Pokémon Go recently became the most downloaded game in smartphone history. The kawaii movement is wide in scope, spanning Manga comics, Harajuku fashion, and Takashi Murakami’s “Superflat” artworks, but what’s behind the aesthetic, and why is it so popular?
Japan’s culture of cute began in the 1970s with a youth movement developed by teenage girls, involving handwriting in a childlike style. The new script was given a variety of names, such as marui ji (round writing), koneko ji (kitten writing), and burikko ji (fake-child writing), and featured text with stylized lines, hearts, stars, Latin characters, and cartoon faces. Many scholars cite this trend as a reaction against the rigidity of post-World War II Japan, as the pursuit of kawaii enabled youth to find a sense of individuality and playfulness in an increasingly serious and depersonalized environment. While many schools initially banned this writing style, advertisers quickly caught onto the trend, using the new aesthetic to market products to the younger generation.
In 1974, the stationary company Sanrio launched the character of Hello Kitty, printing the now-iconic whiskered white cat on a vinyl coin purse. Forty-two years later, Hello Kitty has been placed on over 50,000 products in more than 70 countries, including toaster ovens, alarm clocks, airplanes, and even sex toys. In 2008, Japan named Hello Kitty as its tourism ambassador, an official invite to the rest of the world to join in on the adorability binge that is kawaii. 
But Hello Kitty is not alone. In fact, each of Japan’s 47 governmental offices has its own kawaii mascot, such as the rosy-cheeked bear Kumamom for the bullet train and the wide-eyed Prince Pickles for the police force. Pokémon has developed another 700 kawaii creatures over the past 20 years, some of which are currently running virtually rampant in cyberspace. Emojis, bitmojis, and even those adorable Casper subway advertisements all take root in the kawaii philosophy.
While kawaii characters are diverse, spanning species both real and imagined, they often follow a basic formula. Kawaii creatures have limited facial features—two wide eyes, a small nose, and maybe a dot for the mouth—rendering them emotionally ambiguous and enabling viewers to project upon them. (For this reason, iPhone emojis have been criticized as not kawaii enough by some Japanese consumers because they feature a greater amount of emotional specificity.) Almost always outlined in black, kawaii characters are pastel-colored, graphically simple, and childlike. Designed to elicit a sense of nostalgia, they often feature big heads and little bodies in order to match the proportions of infants and baby animals.
Scholars have suggested that people grow attached to kawaii characters precisely because of their youthful nature, which elicits the evolutionary impulse to care for the young. “Hello Kitty needs protection,” the sociologist Merry White once explained. “She’s not only adorable and round, she’s also mouthless and can’t speak for herself.” Tamagotchis—a nostalgia-inducing timecapsule for those who came of age in the ’90s—are Japanese gadgets that epitomize this theory, as they require users to look after small digital pets that are sweet and helpless. Reportedly, some Pokémon Go users have opted out of evolving their pokémons, preferring to keep them in an infantile state rather than growing their powers.
The effect of the aesthetic is also to return us to a childlike state. Many from the so-called kawaii generation also desire to be kawaii themselves, whether through infantile voices or juvenile dress. For example, the kawaii trend of “Lolita fashion” promotes a Victorian style of clothing, ripe with innocent-looking petticoats, ruffles, pastel colors, and large ribbons and bows. Whether Lolita-kawaii is named after Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel or is Japanese in origin, however, is still a hotly debated topic.
The Lolita aesthetic is not the only sub-brand of kawaii thriving today. Guro-kawaii (grotesque cute), ero-kawaii (erotic cute), kimo-kawaii (creepy cute), and busu-kawaii (ugly cute) have all emerged as alternatives to the more traditional style of Hello Kitty and Pikachu. Meanwhile, contemporary artists Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara have ushered kawaii into the fine arts, creating their own series of wide-eyed characters that range from the vapidly cute to the uncomfortably sinister.
In his paintings and sculptures, Murakami reminds viewers that the style of kawaii carries with it a certain darkness. His depictions of cartoon mushrooms, for example, appear entirely joyous at first glance, but also recall the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For Murakami, the kawaii aesthetic acts as an enduring symbol of the infantilized nature of occupied Japan after World War II—a manner through which people found escape from the trauma of war.
Since its beginnings, the kawaii craze has been a rebellion against the seriousness of adulthood—a counterbalance to the harshness of the real world. Under the strain of a polarizing election cycle, it is perhaps no wonder why over 15 million people have decided to temporarily tune out the news for a dive into Pokémon Go. The app invokes the child within, encouraging users to find imaginary friends and care for them, or at least so I’ve heard. This writer is still at level one.

—Sarah Gottesman

Cover image: Takashi Murakami, Rainbow Flower - 4 O'Clock, 2007. Image courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.

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Embracing Authenticity—and Finding It in Film

New Generation of Photographers Are Embracing Authenticity—and Finding It in Film

Petra Collins, Untitled (24 Hour Psycho), 2016. Image courtesy of the artist and Ever Gold [Projects].
It’s 2007, four years after digital photography spiked to prominence, eclipsing the sales of film. I’m working in the West Hollywood studio of one of the world’s most famous photographers and the pioneer of digital photography himself. Today, he’s tasked me with sifting through a towering stack of hundreds of digital prints of a cloaked and shaggy-haired Jesus, his palms outstretched to the heavens, to find the perfect image of his hand. The chosen one would be stitched together by a master digital retoucher—à la Frankenstein—to achieve the perfect man.
Nine years later, much of what was previously a highly technical process of retouching, an art form in itself, has been given to the masses. My parents’ laptops each have Photoshop. (They’re in medicine, and definitely not photographers.) Teenagers’ smartphones are armed with multiple editing apps. (Okay, mine is too.) With a few swipes of the finger, anyone can now more or less accomplish the result of the many nuanced retouching techniques that once turned even the experts cross-eyed.
But while this unlocked accessibility is thrilling in its ability to democratize artmaking, it also represents the current climax of this stage of what was once revolutionary technology. This has sparked a renaissance in analog photography, from fashion photographers embracing their genre’s roots to a new generation of fine art photographers who grew up with digital at their fingertips but are ditching it for a new outlet: film.
It’s taken us four long decades to get here. From the young engineer Steven Sasson’s invention of the digital camera at Eastman Kodak in 1975, to the release of Photoshop in 1990, to each release of Apple’s iPhone with a camera that trumps yet a greater number of DSLRs, digital technology has tirelessly transformed an ever-evolving medium. But what happens when these tools, once solely for the craftsmen, are so broadly open-sourced?
The bar to take a decent photograph has been increasingly lowered, and the skills required to doctor it up wholly democratized. It’s no longer just fashion photographers synthesizing faces and liquefying limbs; amateurs are coolly retouching stray people out of their snaps or zapping their zits before publishing to Instagram. For hobbyists and pros alike, we’ve reached a point at which the photos we see are both indecipherable from reality and not representative of it. Trust suffers. Viewers and creators alike crave authenticity.
Manipulated photography existed long before Photoshop. Long before there were computers (never mind the infamous Skinnify app), Richard Avedon elongated models’ torsos and necks. He even physically cut-and-pasted heads and body parts. “The minute you pick up the camera you begin to lie—or to tell your own truth,” the late photographer once said.
A century before, Gustave Le Gray pieced together separate negatives for ocean and sky that, when combined, would print an otherwise unattainable seascape. And in the 1940s, British photographer Cecil Beaton trimmed the waistline and smoothed the wrinkles of then-Princess Elizabeth. This magic happened in the darkroom, where there are hard-stop limits to how far one can bend the truth.
Today, digital technology has broadened the scope of what we can do—and who can do it. But we’re hitting up against a wall where this manufactured perfection mostly falls flat. This shift by no means isolates itself in photography. In actuality, the shift reflects a broader societal move that privileges realism and greater authenticity: Artists are turning to handmade craft with pottery wheels and weaving looms; a tasting menu served in the back room of a Bushwick pizza joint has replaced the white-table-cloth opulence of Daniel; Facebook Live and Snapchat take over the social media landscape.
It’s little surprise to see fashion photographers, grand masters of illusion, leading the charge back to good old, honest film. In May, Calvin Klein, never a stranger to provocation, unveiled a scandalous new ad campaign featuring an up-skirt shot of a 22-year-old Danish model. Perhaps even more radical, though, is that photographer Harley Weir shot the photos entirely on film. You might stop in your tracks for the hypersexual “I flash in #mycalvins” billboard, but this curiosity will be rewarded by the depth of color and dreamy, radiant light only photographs actually shot on film can provide. In a time when pre-packaged photo filters mean it’s never been easier to imitate the look of film, we’re aching for the real thing.
With the snap of her shutter Weir—a 27-year-old photographer who’s become one of fashion’s hottest young talents—channeled the very beginnings of fashion photography. Classic film cameras demanded immaculate styling and spot-on exposures but delivered, in exchange, luscious black-and-white prints. Rewinding a near half-century of innovation away from chemicals and film canisters, she caught an idling baton thrown by the pioneers of the 20th century, from Edward Steichen, who shot the first-ever fashion photographs of couturier Paul Poiret’s gowns, to Beaton and his beloved Rolleiflex. 
And then there’re the fashion photographers who’ve stuck with film all along, like David Bailey, who has captured some of the most iconic portraits of the last 60 years with his own Rolleiflex camera. Does he care that photography has opened up its flood gates to the masses? “No,” he said in 2011, “it makes the good [photographs] even more powerful because it hasn’t taken away the good ones. The good ones are still there. Digital and Photoshop just moved mediocrity up a stop, that’s all. They’re still mediocre—they just look better.”
Digital photographers continue to multiply. But, in step, a new generation of young photographers who’ve grown up with iPhones and touch-of-a-finger editing apps are side-stepping those technologies in favor of working with film. It’s slower, it’s harder to use—but that’s precisely what an emerging demographic, one met with constant virtual stimulation and flooded with digital images, is looking for.
Take 23-year-old rising star Petra Collins, for example, who shoots the beauty of teenage girlhood solely with 35mm film—and refuses to retouch—for its authenticity. (Her 2015 photo shoot pictured here captures girls crying, no airbrushing allowed.) According to a 2015 survey by Ilford Photo, 30% of all film users are under age 35. This means given the choice to shoot some 10,000 photos without changing a memory card and instant gratification, they’re opting for analog’s 24 images per roll of film in equal numbers to the other two thirds of the population. No longer starry-eyed for sharpness, they’re swapping pixels for grain, following a slowed-down path to imperfect but real and emotional pictures that, alongside technological innovations, are every bit as renegade as the digital prints once were.
Left: Petra Collins, Untitled (24 Hour Psycho), 2016. Image courtesy of the artist and Ever Gold [Projects]; Right: Julian Charriere, Polygon XXVII, 2016. Image courtesy of DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM, Berlin.
Undoubtedly, artists will continue to push forward what’s possible in the use of digital technology to capture images. Tomorrow, even, an artist might hack together a means of image capturing that completely blows apart our understanding of how we can create and consume visual culture. I’ll be the first one in line to take a look. But, if the above artists’ shifts is any indication, the kind of digital photography we’ve come to know, photography mediated through Photoshop, seems to have passed its climax of relevance to those now entering the field.
Will the masters of that medium who transformed the photograph from being a record of truth to a starting point for an artist’s imagination fall by the wayside in the process? Certainly not. They’ll continue to introduce us to surreal, composite worlds that defy everything we think we knew. But they’ll also be working all the harder to do so, fighting against a population edited to the point of becoming blasé.


—Molly Gottschalk

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