From the moment one squeezes through the six thick hanging slabs of foam that serve as the old saloon-style entranceway to Jun Miura's current exhibition at the Laforet Museum, it is apparent that this is no ordinary art show. "Jun Chan Intense #3" is the latest installment in the artist's popular Laforet series and it offers up a postmodern smorgasbord of Japanese pop culture, as seen through the eyes of a seemingly ageless pop culture hero.
Miura does a good job of hiding his 44 years behind a set of dark sunglasses and shoulder-length hair. The Kyoto-born "multi-tarento" also uses his experience as an illustrator, musician and record producer to good effect, mining old films and phonograph records for the '60s and '70s camp sensibilities that inform his work.
In the mid-1990s, actor/musician Tomoru Taguchi hooked up with Miura to form a musical group more inspired by concept than oriented toward performance. Under the name "The Bronsons" (from the no-nonsense machismo of Hollywood action man Charles Bronson), they released a CD single, "Mandam The World Of Man," the title lifted from a corny '70s Japanese television commercial for a manly after shave lotion.