Fantastic Blognanza!

Happy new year, everyone!

Sorry about the dearth of posts as of late. It’s been a busy week or so for all of us, what with the holidays and family obligations and all that jazz. Still, that’s no excuse for missing our Monday posting date, so we’ll try extra hard to pick up the slack.

But this time around I want to take a small break from talking about t-shirts and point you all towards the work of the Japanese artist Yanobe Kenji.

I recently had to write an essay about him for my Japanese pop culture class, and I became really intrigued by his pieces. His work tends to consist of functional sculptures and installation pieces, which usually require active participation on the part of the viewer. A good example is this tanking machine — essentially a kind of sensory deprivation tank intended to aid meditation.

I think I’ve isolated three themes that draw me towards Yanobe’s work, which I’ll enumerate for you here:
1) A seemingly unrelenting obsession with nuclear apocalypse.
2) An eerily beautiful visual style.
3) A really entertaining sense of humor.

The first point is pretty apparent after clicking around his website for, oh, maybe 20 seconds? There are many, many examples of pieces intended to be used for post-apocalyptic survival. In fact, one of his earlier projects involved traipsing around the ruins of Chernobyl in his “Atom Suit”. (Interestingly, the suit was not designed to protect Yanobe; he was deliberately subjecting himself to harmful levels of radiation.)

The second point is really a matter of personal taste, I suppose. One of my favorite examples is probably this sculpture, called New Deme:

As for the third point, I’ll refer to the first image I posted in this entry, of Yanobe riding on his Foot Soldier. Maybe it’s just me, but I find the sight of this seemingly innocuous Japanese fellow sitting atop a pair of giant blue motorized Godzilla legs to be immensely entertaining.

There’s also Giant TORAYAN, a 25-foot tall robotic doll billed as “the ultimate child’s weapon, as it sings, dances, breathes fire, and follows only those orders given by children.”

Or perhaps you’d prefer something a little more… subtle? Okay, here’s one for you: the Emergency Escape Pod. The pods are designed to provide the user protection in the case of an emergency, detecting radiation levels with a geiger counter. According to my professor, Yanobe placed a few of these pods out onto the street corners of Tokyo. Passersby could go inside and drop in some money to activate the machine. After the machine detected a certain amount of radiation, it would deactivate, and the user would have to insert more money to start the thing up again. Instead of collecting the money as profit, however, Yanobe simply used it to create and deploy more of the pods. Sooner or later the authorities put an end to this clever scheme, but a little part of me wishes that he had been able to keep going with it. Oh well.

Yanobe’s done plenty of other interesting work, too, though I’ve probably gone on far too long about him already. If you’re still interested, a Google search will yield some more information. I also suggest sifting through the Engrish on his home page.

Hopefully I haven’t bored too many of you with this zany Japanese modernist dude. Don’t worry — we’ll be back to talking about t-shirts next time around.

Link: [Yanobe Kenji Art Works]