| Over the past few years Majima's work has been met with both accolade and confusion at once. The general press were befuddled and shocked by his show MAM MAM at the Ashiya City Museum in 1996 - the Japanese press are not renowned for their enthusiasm about contemporary art, but this time there was quite a turn out in the papers. And at his Majimart (link is in japanese) show, while the 'criticians' (as a Japanese friend unintentionally, and wonderfully, misnames them) struggled to twist their stodgy vocabulary into a respectable 'art world' response, among the regular gallery goers there were smiles and nodding heads all over.
The works are both very funny and refreshingly blunt. They stab at a place in the Japanese bosom that needs to be stabbed, but on the whole isn't, and Majima's gentle nature wields the foil with great skill. The surface theme is food. Mainly Japanese fast-food - noodles, lunch-boxes, rice balls. Majima's wit and honesty use this theme to poke at the disposable, convenience society of modern Japan. But as much as the work reflects something of contemporary Japanese society as a whole, so it, and the reaction to it, also says something about the contemporary art society in Japan. In his interview, Majima says how grateful he was to be thanked and appreciated by the curator of the EAT! show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Wouldn't happen in Japan, he says.
Hmm. Time a few Japanese curators took a communal bath in a bowl of noodles, perhaps. |
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