"Street culture" and graffiti came into Japan around the 1990s, primarily as a fashion trend that accompanied the spread of hip-hop music and skateboarding. Traditionally, of course, it has grittier associations with American slums and ghettoes, where it became, at its most politically conscious, an expression of dissatisfaction with the status quo of racism, lack of economic opportunity, and a widening disparity between rich and poor.
These opposites -- fashion from "the system" versus fashion from the street -- capture the contradiction of putting graffiti in a gallery. It's taming a wild style that has prided itself on keeping it real by putting it in the trend-conscious boxes of the art world. But it's happened before in other cities and other times -- think of New York with Futura, Jean-Michel Basquiat, or even Keith Haring.
And now it's being done in Japan at the Art Tower Mito's Contemporary Art Gallery in Ibaraki Prefecture in conjunction with the Mito Arts Foundation and Kaze magazine. The gallery is putting on "X-COLOR/Graffiti in Japan," a large-scale show of 38 of Japan's top graffiti artists, together with major sponsors including G-shock, Shiseido, Asahi, Tower Records and agnes b. Ironically, tickets to the exhibition (running till Dec. 4) can be purchased via Japan Rail train company, an organization you might consider the natural archenemy of graffiti. What's going on?