Think of post-World War II popular culture in Japan as it relates to contemporary art, and you invariably arrive at Murakami Takashi and his Kaikai Kiki company/studio. But a new generation that draws from Japanese pop culture — and yet has no close connections to Murakami's art stable — has emerged in recent years, and the eponymous exhibition of works by Ryuta Ohtake (b. 1976), currently showing at Osaka's Taro Nasu Gallery, is fairly representative.
Raised in a world enamored of role play and virtual reality, Ohtake's present work explores the conventions of video games, posing the question: Which is the more realistic, the fictional world of the game or the one that surrounds us? It is a provocative enough query, dealing as it does with misgivings about the effects that an entertainment form saturated with sex and violence has on the young — particularly boys — and how the vices of games could cross over into actions in real life.
In his canvases, however, Ohtake deals with much less explosive issues. The artist sees video games as metaphors for society, as they too are controlled by rules and feature ideologies, social constructs and choices. In both worlds, there are struggles between people, antagonistic relations between individuals and society and the desire to interpret unwritten rules. (One major difference: The indiscriminate killings that are the common resolution to such conflicts in video-game narratives are received with horror and disbelief in the real world.)