Visually speaking, "Point of Purchase" has to be the busiest art exhibition in Tokyo at the moment. The pageantry of graffiti tags-cum-advertising signs is a lot of things: a throwback to yesterday's dorky company logos; a reminder that advertising is far more insidious these days; and a warning that tomorrow we may well find ourselves in a pseudo reality, dumbly and endlessly alternating, as theorists predicted 40 years ago, between production time and consumption time.

Installation view of "Point of Purchase" by Barry McGee

The show is steeped in a healthy measure of social cynicism, and saturated with color and energy. What's most important though is that the show -- the work of a trio of thirtysomething Americans: Todd James, Barry McGee and Stephen Powers -- is quite a lot of fun.

Now on exhibit at the Parco Gallery in Tokyo's Shibuya district, "Point of Purchase" features paintings, photography, three-dimensional works and installations -- a bit of just about everything. Some are calling it "the graffiti show," and this might be a nice way to approach the exhibition. All three of the participating artists have at some time taken to the streets with an aerosol can in hand to spray a little self-expression into their urban environment. But what sets these three apart from the typical sprayer of graffiti is the way their creations have defined a neat nexus between the American cityscape's traditional and rebellious graphic imagery.

"When we first started," says Powers, who counts Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat among his influences, "I was using my tag [a graffitist's signature; Powers' is 'Espo'] in a sort of logo-based style and the idea of a brand emerged, so instead of the unreadable wild style that most graffiti goes toward, I started building 'Espo' into a sort of brand-based graphic."

There are a number of large, 1950s-style signs here, made up in steel and plastic and silvers and reds. The signs are surprisingly well-crafted, looking just like the real thing. But instead of advertising a soft drink or antacid brand, they announce notions such as "Faith" and "Wellness." The idea is simple: Advertisers appeal to consumers' desire for things like happiness, but do so by selling products like fabric softeners. The "Point of Purchase" artists, on the other hand, cut to the quick and offer the real thing.

The center of the exhibition is a mockup of a neighborhood grocery (remember neighborhood groceries?), and this is a small-scale version of the "Streetmarket" installation the three artists recently showed at Deitch Projects, one of influential New York gallery owner Jeffery Deitch's spaces. Here one finds shelves piled high with products such as "Sweet Sticky Innocence" (in a plastic bleach bottle) and "Fiend" (in a menacing yellow and black can). Other products are labeled "Delusion" and "Dignity," while a hand-scrawled sign above the fake cash register warns that "Shoplifters will be batted down -- Thanx, Management."

James, whose tag is "Reas," explains the inspiration for the store interior installation: "It comes from a specific sort of small store, found mainly in Hispanic neighborhoods, that has everything. I had five of them on my block, and I find the same fascination here in Shibuya with the dense, colorful, packed-in graphics everywhere, the way there is lots of information coming at you at once."

The shelves, like all the spray-painted wall and floor space in the gallery, are as full as they could be. Everywhere one looks in the gallery there is something different and unexpected, such as a half-dozen torn pieces of paper with little poems scrawled on them or a wonderful "tagger's" jacket outfitted with inside pockets that hold spray cans and assorted street painter's materials. Perhaps because the three artists were fashioning work from locally-acquired materials until just hours before the opening party, this is a show that doesn't give up.

In a city besieged by information overload, what makes "Point of Purchase" succeed is partly the frankness of its social commentary, which is on the whole more hopeful than cranky. For now, at least, these three rising art stars are committed to staying in touch with their roots. Says McGee ("Twist"), the graffitist who first brought the team together, "I had the luck to get scooped off the streets somehow, and now I'm trying to get back onto the streets."