Yayoi Kusama. Manhattan Suicide Addict, 2010-present (video still); video projection and mirrors; overall dimensions vary with each installation. Courtesy of the Artist and David Zwirner.

Kusama’s practice develops a cult of personality as a result of the simple fact that she is her work. Compulsive in quantity and in form, Kusama’s work consists totally of her own hallucinatory obsessions; the spots, tentacle forms, and phalluses in her work are based on visual hallucinations she has experienced since childhood. A permanent resident at a psychiatric institution since her return to Japan in 1973, Kusama has crafted an immense body of work as an extension of her disorder and as a balm for it, effectively enshrouding herself and her viewers in her own hallucinations.

Kusama’s infinity rooms are perfect for a Time Out blurb—a great free activity in Chelsea just off the High Line. The rooms are hyper-popular, and the agony of the line to see them necessarily becomes part of the texture of the work itself. Snow began to fall as I shivered in line, and in a brief episode of hysteria, I wondered if Zwirner purposefully had the show in December in a Darwinian scheme to cut the lines down. Even after leaving the gallery, I couldn’t decide: Was waiting two hours for a strict sixty seconds of transcendence a brutal, capitalist exercise or actually a pilgrimage toward a quasi-mystic experience? Standing on a rubber island at the precipice of a glittering reflection pool surrounded by the infinite refractions of Kusama’s glowing dots, I had been guided toward the edge. The frigid line became an act of duration that made the ecstasy of my entire solitary, quiet minute in Kusama’s mini-heaven of LED lights that much sweeter by contrast.

There is no line to see Kusama’s impressive breadth of paintings, which span David Zwirner’s two adjacent locations on 19th street and should not be overlooked. Her patterned dots form rivers or pathways through a landscape of repetitive, androgynous profiles and monochromatic walls of eyes. To me, these figurative, pointillist landscapes recall the visual language of Aboriginal dot paintings. Such subconscious confluence made me consider these paintings in light of Jungian forms: depictions of buried psychic landscapes containing “their own pictorial logic,” as the show’s press release states.

(from left to right) Yayoi Kusama. Searching For Love, 2013; Morning Has Come, 2013; Pensive Night, 2013; My Heart, 2013; all works, acrylic on canvas; 76 3/8 x 76 3/8 in. Courtesy of the Artist and David Zwirner.

To call Kusama’s work “outsider art” is a common mistake. She has always worked in fervent pursuit of fame and notoriety in the art world, and though her recently snowballing popularity is highly deserved, it is important to understand why Kusama’s work has gone unrecognized until this late stage in her career. Kusama was a visionary predecessor of trends in minimalism and pop art—movements that are largely credited to the work of her white male peers.

There is a still-prevalent trend in painting to discuss abstract and minimalist composition as accomplished through a series of logical moves—the development of formulas and blueprints more associated with “design” than any kind of affective reaction. But this confluence of abstraction with rationality, formula, and straightforward (even mathematical) construction is a kind of oxymoron that leaves us at a hollow dead end. What is the point of an artistic formula that does not point toward the infinite?

Yayoi Kusama. Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light
Years Away, 2013; Wood, metal, glass mirrors, plastic, acrylic panel, rubber,
LED lighting system, and acrylic balls; 113 x 163 3/8 x 168 1/8 in. Courtesy of the Artist and David Zwirner.

This trend is also associated with a kind of historically masculine, often arrogant ego. The marginalization of Kusama as an Asian woman has much to do with the way her work was co-opted by the white-male-washed gallery scene at the apex of her career in 1960’s-1970’s New York. Kusama has continually made abstract, minimalist, and suggestively figurative work that is deeply rooted in a profound emotional and psychic condition. This work is incredibly real to Kusama; it is a necessary externalization of deep phobia, a kind of exorcism that results in an essential construction of form. This abstraction can lend itself to feeling, to a fervent connection to the human condition, to the struggle of madness and the limits of sanity. As Kusama has stated, “I create art for the healing of all mankind”(1). In copying her forms, however, her white male peers have effectively robbed this kind of work of its radiance—of any productive extension toward depth and connection. Theirs is the empty work of those who seek to understand nothing about mental suffering, and in fact seek to eradicate it in favor of logic and structure. I cannot see this as anything but a violent, masculine suppression of the radical potentiality of the divine feminine. Such femininity is quickly labeled as Other, as exotic, as foreign, weird, and thus it is easily marginalized.

Kusama is resistant to institutions that try to classify her work, and rightly so. As she says, “Kusama is Kusama”(2). Her work constructs a singular mythology around a highly insular life. Though it is inwardly focused, Kusama’s work has always dealt in the transcendence of reality, in the creation of a fantasy (or nightmare) layered on top of present space. In her newest infinity rooms, the continuity of these gestures toward the infinite leads us down a poetic tunnel through an easy, soft, melancholy transition into the afterlife. Standing on the precipice of the sparkling reflection pool, my fingers finally regaining sensation from the cold, I wanted to cry. I felt it very important to catalog my feelings at that moment—to honor Kusama’s dedication to poetic sensation and to dedicate my own affective reaction to her psychosomatic projections on the difficult experience of everyday structure.

I Who Have Arrived in Heaven is on view at David Zwirner, New York, through December 21, 2013.

(1) Quoted from the Artist. Grady Turner,”Yayoi Kusama,” BOMB Magazine, Winter 1999. http://bombsite.com/issues/66/articles/2192
(2) Quoted from the Artist. Kay Itoy, “Kusama Speaks,” Artnet. August 22, 1997. http://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/itoi/itoi8-22-97.asp

Left: Barbara Takenaga, "Blue Wheel," 2007. Acrylic on panel, 24 x 20 in. Right: Daniel Zeller, "Filtered Compression," 2008. Ink in colors on paper, 10 1/4 x 8 in. Both from the collection of Richard Green.

In contemporary U.S. culture, abstract art is difficult for many to grasp because it so completely defeats the imposition of language on art that cultural meaning falls away. If abstract art asserts meaning at all, it does so elliptically, circling around, not toward, the identifiable expression of objects, events, people, experiences, emotions, or ideas that representational art depicts. In a sense, then, abstract art is always subversive, always in conflict with mainstream European cultural and historical imperatives to populate the canvas with recognizable objects, traditionally the symbols and tropes that a particular era and place associates with authority and power, history, capital, or god. This dominant way of making and perceiving persists even though U.S. culture has been from the start, and is continually, inflected with culturally multitudinous ways of expressing and seeing. Even when it deploys forms, colors, and compositions that are culturally resonant, abstract art incites the visitor to relinquish this representational predictability and safety.

In the face of unpredictability, however, I, the viewer, am pushed toward agency. I must see in personal terms rather than in the prefabricated terms of literal depiction. Abstraction is cruel in that way. Either I trust the legitimacy of the intuitions this personal journey may inspire or I doubt the work—or, worse, myself.

The museum can be a testing ground for the subversive tactics of personal agency that abstract art both requires and invites. Untethered to the anchors of representation, I can, and maybe should, release myself from the desire to correspond my experience of the artwork both to the concrete world and to the artist’s intention for the work. In this other(worldly) dimension, I interpret the abstract in the stream-of-consciousness associative way of dreams, attributing representational appearances to my psychological projections. The “real” might materialize, but it is protected from becoming too sensical, too literal, too dominating. It is, instead, bounded by the rules of dreams, which allow the fantastic to manifest without threatening the order of things. In this dreamworld, I can, and maybe must, suspend the laws of physics that define time and space, harnessing new tools and methods—for example, the superhuman powers of flight, of shapeshifting.

The way to see abstract art is to stretch the experience beyond seeing, to perceive the artwork not as the flat modernist ideal of itself, but as a four-dimensional world unchained from the “real” four-dimensional world. To see abstract art is, then, to construct an experience more akin to that of sculptural world of artists such as Richard Serra, Anish Kapoor, or Maya Lin than to the flattened world of painting. Further, the way to hear the language of abstract art is to honor its inclinations to unsay as it simultaneously says, rather than to disrespect these inclinations by interrupting, by requiring the artwork to choose one thing that might be said and to say it finally.

Daniel Zeller, "Undefined Edge," 2003. Graphite on paper, 19 x 25 inches. Collection of Richard Green.

Flowering Associations

Does Daniel Zeller’s Undefined Edge (2003), for example, depict a tattered garment, a landscape of lakes, a lacerated body, or an exploration of form and texture? I see (and hear) all of these, then I see one more than another, then another more than the last. I find myself made small, walking the gray landscape of the graphite drawing, approaching the lines that seem to represent thread—stitches to repair holes in the garment or to suture the lesions on the skin—as I might approach a bridge over a lake. I find myself first tiny, as if borne above this strange countryside by hot-air balloon, and then life-sized, as if entering the frame, wielding the needle to attend the damage. And all of this wandering, the collision of one allusion with another, resolves for a moment in the experience of exquisite attention. I focus on this environment—garment, body, lake—upon which I have come not as if I were seeing it at Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum, but despite the fact it hangs in the museum’s exhibition of abstract art, Approaching Infinity.

There may be a neurological basis for my behavior, the brain’s capacity to discern a recognizable object even, at times, from the evidence of only a few lines. Since the visual system is designed to perceive objects, particularly faces, relying on only the incomplete information the eye gathers, it would seem pointless to avoid such associations.[1] But it is equally foolish to force any single association to dominate when that association might yield to another and then another, or to actively seek allusions to the “real” when the mind has the capacity to experience form as feeling alone. The beauty of abstraction, then, is not that it invites personal associations free of the strictures within which representational art operates, but that it encourages a flowering of associations to co-exist even as they contradict, conflate, compete, diverge, even as they cancel each other out, leaving only the exuberance of bodily feeling.

Stephen Antonakos, "J #12 Berlin," 1980. Carbon pencil and colored pencil on vellum, 17 x 14 in. Collection of Richard Green.

Stephen Antonakos’s J #12 Berlin (1980) and Mark Sheinkman’s 2.29.2005 (2005), like Zeller’s Undefined Edge, are both tributes to the depth and variety of mark and effect that can be coaxed from the deceptively one-dimensional graphite. J #12 Berlin, a labor of mark making, covered with a thousand short strokes that combine and diverge, seems to record the path of a school of minnows as they flit through the water, first as one, then divided, then recombined. Or is it a memory of fur on the body of a cat that has accepted the indignity of being rubbed in many directions? Or of rocks in a river? (And even if the six red-pencil disks Antonakos deploys to dot the water–fur–river do not recede, they do not interfere with my shifting associations.) Likewise as I inhabit Sheinkman’s 2.29.2005, an effusion of white lines on gray paper, I am borne on contrails, fleeting around a space with no time to wonder where I am—a galaxy or an atom—or where I am going.

Mark Sheinkman, "2.29.2005," 2005. Graphite on paper, 13 3/4 x 11 inches. Collection of Richard Green.

In these abstract works, what might seem to be repeating patterns—one artist in the show, Alexander Gorlizki, defines himself as a “farmer of patterns”—become environments. Even Yayoi Kasuma’s Wave of Sea (2003) reveals itself as more than a pattern of black, blue, and white, more than the recurring flower petals or waves each figure resembles, once the painting invites me in. Floating above such landscapes, I enter and proceed through masses of shape, skip from one place to another, ascend, descend, immerse. My eyes do not stand aside to survey and document these contours (perhaps taking advantage of the magnifying glasses hanging in the gallery to inspect the detail). Instead, my body follows them, infiltrating the landscapes they describe and discovering their patterns repeated within myself.

Left: Yayoi Kusama, "Wave of the Sea," 2003. Acrylic on linen, 21 x 18 in. Right: Alexander Gorlizki, "Manuscript," 2007. Pigment and gold leaf on antique paper, 9 1/2 x 12 1/2 inches. Both from the collection of Richard Green.

These experiences of embodiment are more customary to the experience of abstract sculpture, which is less likely to provoke the uneasy search for representational meaning that flat abstract works do. Sculptures such as Serra’s Sequence (2006) and Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (2006) might arouse representational urges—a Utah slot canyon for the former; a kidney bean for the latter—but each, enveloping from inside or outside, demands physical exploration more than mental riddle-solving.

Richard Serra’s "Sequence," on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

I am not saying that is it impossible to enter, embodied, the frame of a representational piece. I am saying that abstract art—by the nature of its artifice—encourages entry, while representational art—by the nature of its artifice—discourages it. Unlike abstracts, representational works specify the content and scale of recognizable worlds, creating a discontinuity between the gallery and the scene—either a garment, a body, or a lake-strewn countryside, but never all three—and almost never close enough to life-size to be mistaken for the world of the gallery itself.[2]

Nor am I saying embodiment is necessary to the abstract art experience. Abstract art bestows gifts in its flattened form, the flatness of the canvas being the enduring legacy of modernism; and many of the works in Approaching Infinity, for example, Susanne Schossig’s Light Blue Field (2007), invite the eye to skitter along their surfaces, to relish pattern, color, texture, composition, and form. What I am saying is this: by recognizing the willingness of abstract art to bear the weight of my experiential inquiry—my embodied experience of it—I can open up my own internal space to the artwork’s internal space. In this process, I subvert not just the boundary between me and the artwork, but also the boundaries between abstraction and representation, between even two-dimensional artwork and three- and four-dimensional sculpture.

Left: Susanne Schossig, "Light Blue Field," 2007. Gouache on mylar, 11 3/4 x 11 3/4 inches. Right: Dennis McLeod, "Blue Black Swirl," 2010. Ink in colors on paper, 11 x 8 1/2 inches. Both from the collection of Richard Green.

A Confusion of Dimensions

It is not always easy to enter an image, to reconceive its flatness as topography, to resist the detail, the craft that might shimmer, even as it is distanced through a magnifying glass. But the dividing line between the visual experience of flat works and the embodied experience of sculptural ones is not a natural one. Neither flat works nor sculpture demands the boundary, even if we interpret the behaviors their media—flat paper or canvas or pixels; bent steel or resin; even water—promote as directives to limit our experience of the works. If flat, non-representational artworks do not invite me into themselves using sculptural means (or, for that matter, the methods of virtual reality), it is not out of reticence. In fact, since there is no obvious portal, no pathway in steel or gateway of stone, there is no wrong way in, no wrong way out.

“No wrong way in, no wrong way out” could be, then, a call to subversive action. But where in this call is either the frank political or social message—another form of representation—of polemical art or the more embodied interventions of social practice? What is the political action that “no wrong way” incites? I struggle to avoid an either/or binary here. There is a place for works of art that state their messages, political or otherwise, unabashedly and frankly, or which seek to move us toward specific political revelations or even actions. But to dismiss abstract art as self-indulgent or insular is to miss a different set of richly political possibilities.

“No wrong way in, no wrong way out” is a call to escape the cultural biases and psychological pressures of a representation-hungry world. It is a call to defy the regime of representation that requires art, both abstract and representational, to represent something, to have a particular message rather than an ever-changing set of associations, feelings, meanings. If, as I suggest, abstract art can foster subversive acts—embodiment, contemplation, and personal interpretation—it would seem to qualify as training in the agency and imagination necessary for modern citizenship.

All the works in this essay are on display at the Crocker Art Museum’s “Approaching Infinity: The Richard Green Collection of Meticulous Abstraction,” through May 5, 2013.

Rob Marks writes about the nature of the aesthetic experience and its effect on self and society. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley and in visual and critical studies from the California College of the Arts. Marks recently won the Hannah Arendt Prize in Critical Theory and Creative Research for his essay, “The Site of Imaginative Contention.”

Pipilotti Rist, "Sip My Ocean," 1996

Within the past five years two all-male bands have covered the ire-raising, too-sweet-for-comfort single by The Crystals, “He Hit Me (And it Felt Like a Kiss).” Carole King and Gerry Goffin purportedly wrote the song after learning singer Little Eva had been beaten, multiple times, by her boyfriend, though Eva claimed the beatings were motivated by love. Phil Spector produced the song in 1962, letting not a note of irony seep through. “If he didn’t care for me/I could have never made him mad/He hit me and I was glad”: the song’s seeming sincerity and the near gleefulness of its sound got it banned on radio stations around the country. It justified victimhood, claimed powers-that-be.

The Blackeyed Susans’ 2009 rendition, called “She Hit Me,” nearly purges the song of it’s tooth—the “she” doing the hitting seems hot-tempered perhaps, but otherwise fairly tame. Grizzly Bear’s 2007 cover keeps “He” as the pronoun, and quiets the song. The man-on-man violence it evokes seems to play out on a leveler field, and the moodiness of the vocals come from a place of personal darkness rather than abused submission. Certainly, neither cover vindicates the female protagonist trapped in The Crystal’s original recording.

Rosha Yaghmai, "Love Forever," 2011, Fiberglass, gel coat, resin, enamel, steel 34 x 77 x 54 inches.

Covers are complicated projects. They let you be a fan, but also a collaborator, a history changer or, sometimes, a subverter. Musicians take them on far more freely than visual artists do; artists tend to prefer “appropriation” when feeling cynical and “homage” when feeling affectionate. But there have been a few memorable art covers, the most compelling of which may be Pipolotti Rist’s Sip My Ocean (1996), a two-channel video installation of a body in water. The soundtrack is Rist singing Chris Isaak’s stiflingly smug Wicked Game, and if you look for her cover on iTunes, you’ll find it under “I’m a victim of this Song.” Around minute three, you hear a screaming echo in the background that sounds like it’s trying to break free of the song’s over-sentimental structure: “No, I don’t want to fall in love,” it crows.

In her current solo exhibition at Thomas Solomon Gallery in Chinatown, Ever let the fancy roam, artist Rosha Yaghmai takes a less far less hostile approach to covers than Rist. She covers self-described Japanese “obsessional artist” Yayoi Kusama in a sculpture called Love Forever, which takes its title from Kusama’s 1998 MoMA retrospective and its form, in a pared down way, from  Accumulation No. 2, a couch covered in white protuberances.

Yayoi Kusama, "Accumulation No. 2," 1968.

In a 1999 interview with BOMB Magazine, Kusama explained, “As an obsessional artist I fear everything I see. At one time, I dreaded everything I was making. The [furniture] thickly covered in phalluses was my psychosomatic work done when I had a fear of sexual vision.” This nightmarish quality is all but gone in Yaghmai’s fiberglass form, a smooth white body that look more like the ghostly sheets thrown over furniture in old houses than a sofa itself. It’s gentle and protuberance-free, and mainly just reinforces its title: love for Kusama, and for the tactile appeal of lovingly crafted physical objects, will continue forever.

If it’s unnerving when a cover of a song as implicitly brutal as “He Hit Me” tames or even overlooks that  brutality,  it’s also unnerving when a re-imagining of work as aggressive and textured as Kusama’s is quiet and smooth. But Yaghmai’s  sculpture seems honest; smoothness is where Kusama’s influence belongs in her mind, and maybe the real question to ask is, how can aggression fade into smooth beauty over time and does this fading mean we’ve lost something or gained something along the way?

Takashi Murakami, DOB JUMP 1999, Silkscreen 40 x 40 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo collection

Japan is utterly strange, if we are to follow in the footsteps of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) as visitors to a country for whose culture and language have (nor do they want to have) absolutely no affinity. Yet their acute sense of dislocation and turmoil in which we are caught up simply play out at the fringes of a site of metaphorical impenetrability that is Japan, like storms in teacups that fleetingly detract from an unimaginably large and unknowable entity. As the film unfolds in an exterior, immense site of unfamiliarity where space is dizzying extended vertically and horizontally, there is an incredible abundance of sights (billboards, people, temples, shrines, bright neon lights) that the panopticon of Tokyo affords as the landscape stretches out for Johansson’s character and the audience. But like her, we the audience, look at images and concepts associated with all things “Japanese,” but can’t understand the sum total of their meanings.

Transcool Tokyo feels like a snapshot of Coppola’s Japan, where the range of exhibited works is diverse enough to constitute a multitude of signs that are likely, directions for us to form personal but also contradictory conclusions of what is meant by contemporary Japanese art. Transcool Tokyo is an open invitation to appreciate the mundane to the point of ridicule (such as the oft-ignored effects of everyday sounds), the obsession with saccharine uber-cuteness, the impressiveness of Japanese technological progress, and the oblique pride in ancient Japanese craft traditions that are paid tribute to, in the exhibited artists’ oeuvres.

Michihiro Shimabuku, Tour of Europe with One Eyebrow 1991, Type C-print, text 70 x 103 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo collection

But at times, it’s just about sheer entertainment and incredulous laughter. Michihiro Shimabuku, on the other hand, shaves off an eyebrow on a tour to Europe and brings an octopus on a tour of Japan in a creative exploration of the meaning of community and social norms. In Criticism and the Lover A, B, C (1990), Yasumasa Morimura grafts his faces into the surfaces of Cezanne’s Apples and Oranges (c. 1899), a narcissistic and Freudian interruption to a cultural paradigm that is western art.

Yasumasa Morimura, Criticism and the Lover A, B, C, 1990.

At other times, the works exhibit a preoccupation with the limits of human perception, the destabilisation of traditional conventions and the profound relativism that ensues – themes that typically recur in contemporary art. For instance, Ryoji Ikeda’s reductively precise video installation Data.matrix [n°1–10] (2006/9) reinforces the paradox that the infinite and indescribable universe can be summarised with mathematical data. Using 2-dimensional sequences of patterns derived from hard drive errors and studies of software code, the imagery transforms into 3-dimensional rotating views of the universe that eventually open up into infinity. Plastered on ten screens, we walk into a sublime, mesmerising project that explores the potential to perceive the vastness of the universe in the multitude of interplanetary constellations and as well as the daily sounds of traffic – brought under the precise but accessible realm of mathematical figures, all in a small space.

Ryoji Ikeda, Data.matrix n1–10, 2006/9, 10 projectors 360 x 2480 cm. Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo collection.

Strangeness however, is never more apparent in the singularly unique Japanese fixation on the cult of cuteness (or “kawaii” in Japanese). Neutered and sweetly naïve, the curious case of cuteness in contemporary Japanese culture finds its roots in the defeat and subsequent disarmament of the country after World War II, in which symbols of capitulation, escapism and renewed innocence were codified into populist media images and contemporary artistic practices. The reconstruction of a post-war, non-violent collective identity based on conventional Western representations of stereotypical ideals of pre-pubescence and innocence, yet hybridized with traditional Japanese drawings, contributed soon enough to the rise of a particular pop culture iconography more commonly associated with anime or manga. Within the cult of cuteness, the trend of miniaturization – this peculiar emotional attachment to small objects reminiscent of childhood and playtime – is layered and gendered, an expression of masked innocence beneath which lies the opposite.

To Takashi Murakami, arguably the Japanese art world’s most famous export, the kawaii aesthetic is merely a part of “Superflat” Japan, a theory postulated by Murakami himself to emphasize the flatness of a particular drawing aesthetic derived from popular culture but valorized in galleries and museums, thereby erasing the distinction between “high” and “low” art. In Murakami’s Flowers (2006), grinning flower-heads explode outward from the canvas in a visual amalgam of colors, packed tightly and superimposed against each other as the epitome of flatness and Japanese quirkiness. Trailing the route of pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein to appropriate commercial imagery to hang in art galleries, Murakami’s alter ego and eventual house brand Mr. DOB in DOB Jump (1999) satirically insists on the arbitrariness of originality and the acceptability of appropriation.

Takashi Murakami, Flowers, 2006, Silkscreen and platinum foil 70 x 70 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo collection.

Colorful, flat and at times contextually rootless, the images of the popular subculture of kawaii extend to behavioral attributes of childlikeness, docility, without the capacity for detestation. But cuteness is also uncanny and menacing, when doll-likeness stamped onto the gauzy-surfaced canvas hint at all that that is not playfulness and innocence. The simple shapes that form Yoshimoto Nara’s fey, two-dimensional cast of cartoonish children in White Night (1998) and Sayon (2006) are incongruent with the apparent incorruptibility of childhood, refusing the infantile and insouciance of adolescence by their defiant posture and suspicious gazes. Nara’s rejection of physical resemblance undermines the claim of portraiture’s alleged truthfulness. The unreliability of the portrait’s exterior consequently forces us to register instead the opposite: the interiority of portraiture and its implicit connotations. Situated – or suspended – in the middle of the canvas’s bare space, they raise a tangle of questions about childhood and cynicism, kitsch and realism. Resembling mulishly silent anime characters that stand isolated and estranged, Nara’s cartoonish children reveal more in that which is not said.

Yoshitomo Nara Sayon, 2006, Acrylic on canvas 146 x 112.5 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo collection.

Transcool Tokyo is a collaborative effort between the Singapore Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and will run at SAM at 8Q until 13 February 2011. The exhibition features established artists such as Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Kiichiro Adachi and Haruka Kojin. Working across all mediums, from painting and sculpture, to performance, photography and video, the artists have created work in response to the onset of the information age and the greater freedoms and uncertainties that are available in contemporary society.