I'm often asked the question: "What characterizes Japanese contemporary art?" At the risk of over-generalizing, I usually reply that two qualities recur among artists at the vanguard of this country's creative culture -- an obsessiveness vis a vis the subject, or an obsessive attention to detail in the actual execution.
Consider the highly finished work of Takashi Murakami and Mariko Mori. These two artists' inspiration -- in Murakami's case manga, anime and otaku culture; for Mori, Eastern mysticism and New Age spiritualism -- find form in pieces which are high-tech, very polished and large scale.
In the other camp we find artists such as Yayoi Kusama, who for 40 years has been painting polka-dot and net patterns; and Makoto Sasaki, whose "Heartbeat Drawings" are wall-covering red-pen-on-paper works which illustrate, hospital ECG-style, the "blip, blip, blip" of his heartbeat.