In 1986, leading Japanese art journal Bijutsu Techo (Art Notes) announced the arrival of women practitioners in Japanese contemporary art, devoting an entire issue to the cho-shojo (supergirls) phenomenon. The ‘supergirls’ of art was a term derived from the female heroines of popular comics and television shows. However, with its unusual combination of a superlative and a diminutive, the very word ‘supergirls’ was indicative of the contradictory aspects of the coverage of women’s participation in contemporary art. On one level, it offered women artists an unprecedented level of attention; on another, it isolated them as a single movement among many within Japanese art, diminishing the role of their work to the ‘merely’ feminine, and thus somehow secondary to seemingly more expansive masculine concerns. Nevertheless, some young artists were able to use it as a point of departure, among them Chie Matsui and Tomoko Sugiyama — key figures in the Kansai New Wave — as well as the movement’s young star Mika Yoshizawa, whose work was included in the 1986 São Paulo Biennial and Manfred Schneckenburger’s immense ‘Documenta 8’ (Kassel, Germany, 1987).

Yoshizawa had first attracted attention for her installations of domestic objects, household appliances and furniture, whose surfaces were decorated with stylised renderings of similar products and painterly glyphs. Questions of space and matter, so central to much Mono-ha and post-Mono-ha work, seemed peripheral to an art that was firmly situated within consumer society and inflected with the feminine experience of domestic labour. As Yoshizawa shifted to more two-dimensional forms at the end of the 1980s — wall painting and then flat modular surfaces — the corporeality evoked in earlier references to housework was channelled through the artist’s bold strokes and agitated brushwork. Though abstract, her dynamic line-work and solid planes of colour belied the ongoing influence of commercial design — particularly of manga, then at the height of its critical and popular appeal. Indeed, the artist would later recall the liberating experience of seeing on the cover of a manga ‘photographs, drawings, text and patterns all appearing together . . . without context’.¹

1–5 1988 is emblematic of Yoshizawa’s vibrant take on painterly abstraction. Executed in ink on vinyl, the marks convey speed and movement, the sense of a glossy brush sliding across a smooth surface. The work’s size is significant, its loops and arcs reading as traces of the artist’s body at full stretch. Yet, its pictorial structure is not the loosely defined plane of much gestural abstraction, but a tight, disciplined geometry. Typical of Yoshizawa’s work of this period, its aesthetic is angular and mechanic; with its bold outlines, it resembles a comic book version of a schematic drawing depicting a gigantic propeller whose two blades appear to rotate around the painting’s centre, framed by a rectilinear structure ending in utilitarian curves, asymmetrical yet balanced. With its odd combination of human gesture and a flat, post-industrial appearance, 1–5 could be mistaken for a by-product of cyberpunk subculture, then in its popular ascendency, and through an association with the cult success of Shinya Tsukamoto’s 1989 film Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira 1988. At the time of the work’s production, cyberpunk was frequently equated with Japan in the international imagination.

Though somewhat reductive, this reading is important, for while Mika Yoshizawa’s practice of the late 1980s and early 1990s helped entrench the acknowledgment of women as central to the development of Japanese art, it also anticipated the wholesale embrace of otaku culture² that would characterise so much art production by Takashi Murakami and others in years to come.

Endnotes

1. Mika Yoshizawa, quoted in Yuko Hasegawa, ‘The cho-shojo movement’, in Doryun Chong, Michio Hayashi, Kenji Kajiya and Fumihiko Sumitomo (eds), From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan 1945–1989, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012, p.372.
2. Otaku refers to a subculture of manga and anime devotees.