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October 22, 2005
Wamono vs. Nagi Noda
The centerpiece of Hifana’s Channel H DVD, the music video for Wamono, is a featured event on pixelsurgeon. I used to read the site religiously as an alternative to K10K about five years ago. When I was invited to OFFF 2002 in Barcelona for a winning flash movie in the experimental category, I even saw the Pixelsurgeon team lecture at the event, and they seemed like an extremely lively, kind and friendly bunch of people that I would have loved to hang out with had I ever lived in London. Well, now in late 2005, the more important issue is actually not that our video is featured on their website, but more that our video is featured as a part of Antenna, screening on the 27th of this month. To tell the truth, I had never heard of this “exciting, bi-monthly series showcasing the most creative, lesser-seen music videos,” but it’s startlingly lofty, showing at London’s National Film Theatre, and with previously featured high-profile pieces such as one of my personal favorites by Alexander Rutterford, Autechre’s Gantz Graf video.
On a more ambivalent note, it seems Wamono has been featured just after revered rip-off artist Nagi Noda’s video for (obnoxious) J-pop artist Yuki. As far as I can tell, these are the only two pieces from Japan that have ever been featured in Antenna. How do they compare to each other? That is an interesting question. In a sense, I see them as diametrically opposite. One is looking inward toward a sampling, hybridization, and modernization of Japanese culture and then projecting it outwards. One is taking a confluence of outside-Japan influences (New York fashion culture? Some vague notion of a Japanized-European art aestheitc?) and projecting them inwards toward a Japanese audience who probably look at it and utter nothing more than a superficialkawaii.
Just thinking about these two positions gives interesting insight into Japans’ creative culture. Vast success comes to Japanese artists and designers once they have lived overseas, come back, and then started making work for a domestic audience (Nagi Noda was in New York from ‘83 to ‘87). But what’s the point? Why seek to become international–to open oneself to global influence and become versed in a foreign culture–only to take shelter back in your own country, revered solely in a domestic sense?
I think I might have been introduced to Nagi Noda at one point. If so, it must have been one of those dreadful incidents where the introducer says of you, “this is so and so who works on such and such,” and the other person just looks the opposite direction. In any case I definitely witnessed her spectacle: showing up with an entourage in a flowing kimono, she certainly stood out at the 2004 (or was that 2003?) Tokyo ADC awards festival. And then at last year’s Tokion Creativity Now event she built up the suspense by showing up late after all the other panelists were already long-settled in their places. She later said that she loved working with Hakuhodo (or was it Dentsu?) because the whole staff would be telling her how smart she was on a daily basis. I call bullshit on this individual.
In the opposite case is my AD at W+K, +cruz, and our team at W+KTokyoLab. We cannot be truly successful in Japan–or perhaps I should say the work itself actually can become successful and revered to Japanese people, known by it’s attachment to an authentically Japanese entity such as Hifana. As an individual however, +cruz could never be a superstar within Japan the way Nagi Noda is, because he is a foreigner producing work inside the country. Moreover his work is striving for a new kind of Japanese-ness that transcends Japan and seeks to unite a pan-asian creative culture. To be a celebrity level foreign artist or designer in this country, you cannot work within the country itself, you have to become idolized from afar, and then imported in, invited in a sense, after which you may eventually attain the status of a god. (I must admit that on a fantastic level this does make a lot of sense to me, as I am certainly no stranger to romanticizing and obsessing over the unknown, the mysterious, and the other). This was the case with Tomato, revered as the creative Jesus in Japan, and perhaps on a smaller scale, TDR, and even Hi-Res, who I recently noticed has a mixi community (which I admittedly and unashamedly joined).
Our work will never be regarded in this kind of way. It has been, and will continue to be regarded more abroad, through circuits such as res and onedotzero, than it is within Japan. It’s interesting to think of all the people who are seeing this work out there, identifying it as an authentic Japanese cultural output, perhaps even letting it shape their view of the contemporary climate within Japan, when really it is in some kind of cultural grey area around which Japan is simply a frame. We are doing the job of selling a contemporary Japanese cool to the world, and we are not Japanese. We are promoters of this nation, not so much to itself as to other foreigners. And perhaps we’ll always be behind the scenes, a place that I am quite comfortable operating from.
Posted by shane at October 22, 2005 02:17 PM