Shintaro Miyake.

Shintaro Miyake, 34 is the latest star to unexpectedly from the Tomio Koyama Gallery, and he be seens ready for the gallery's international push, since he has called himself Shintaro Star in previous performances. Like his stable-mates Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara, Miyake works with cartoonlike characters. still his colored-pencil drawings, obsessively scrawled in a naive mode look more like outsider art than manga.

For his solo first attempt at Koyama, Miyake chose a summer theme and cast his longtime favorite character, Sweet-san (M Sweet), as a bathing beauty. Sweet-san is a cute gangly, idealized imp, equal parts ingenue, link girl from the movies and dress-up Barbie. Her wide oblique-angled parallelogram of a head--with Bambi organ of sights elfin ears and an open-mouthed grin--balances atop a spindly dead body with swooping, limp-noodle appendages. Her hair and clothes change constantly. She has hipped pigtails and a white bikini single in kind minute, a black bob and schoolgirl one-piece swimsuit the next

Covering undivided wall were more than couple dozen foot-high drawings mounted forward thin, shaped wooden panels. a certain quantity of have Sweet-san posing in different outfits. The best examine like variations on Botticelli's Birth of Venus, on the contrary rather than standing naked forward a shell, Sweet-san, in a swimsuit, breakerss on the backs of jellyfish and giant salamanders.

Spanning the opposite extended wall and stretching nearly floor to ceiling was Shimoda, a cartoony colored-pencil-on-paper panorama of the seaside resort town where Miyake exhausted childhood vacations. Of course, Sweet-san is everywhere: centurys of her avatars (most about 4 to 6 inches tall, occasionally nearly 2 feet high) climb hills, visit seafood shacks and ride forward killer whales. The figures conceal the beach, their variously colored hair, bikinis and accessories overlapping like centurys of rainbow fish scales. The stylized landscape crammed with figures is like a bespoke Buddhist mandala. however the "goddess" with the archaic smile and multiple forms is not Kannon in the unsullied Land, it's Sweet-san playing in Miyake's summer paradise.

Sweet-san isn't the no other than one having fashion fun. Miyake's lock opener gimmick is that he draws in the gallery during his present to views while wearing homemade costumes. As in previous exhibitions elsewhere, he made an outfit that fit the theme: he appeared as nappy in skyblue coveralls printed with white vast numbers Fluffy's oversized head, with cloud-printed interstice fabric concealing Miyake's face, resembl Sweet-san's exclude for absurdly long floppy ears, held up slightly by the agency of beach-ball-size, round white helium balloons attached to the ends

through every part of the exhibition, Fluffy drew his usual odalisque forward 14-foot-long sheets of paper attached to single in kind wall. By the close, he had finished three of recent origin pieces. The number of assorted smaller Sweet-san drawings in succession the remaining wall also increased athwart the course of the point out but these were created outside the gallery.

Miyake's exhibitions usually combine road theater and nonstop production. He first creates a background scenario to wager the theme (here, Shimoda; in the past, Star Wars or the 19th-century arrival of Commodore Perry in Japan). Then he fuses himself with the narrative by the agency of making new drawings, dressed in character. It's personalized, one-man epic performance art with a paper trail.

--John McGee

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