Ближе к 2010-ым годам персонажи (как сделать из этого слова феминитив? и нужно ли, если другой гендер художник не изображает?) на холстах Mr. переодеваются и адаптируются к новому сеттингу. Теперь кавайные малышки еще больше напоминают Хайди, героиню мультфильма Исао Такахата. С тем лишь отличием, что героини Господина Янена прогуливаются по нарисованным альпийским пейзажам не в невинных пастушьих платьицах, а в спецформе. Лоликольные фартучки, рюшки, лакированные туфельки убираются в пользу камуфляжных костюмов, касок и берцев. Гиперсексуальность как реквизит сменяется на уверенное владение оружием. Как свойственно настоящему гику, Mr. обвешивает девичьи отряды самыми отборными боеприпасами, едко намекая, что культура насилия, вдохновленная жестокостью компьютерных игр, тоже может порождать собственные тренды. В частности, обязывающую к экспертности моду на определенные лейблы военной амуниции.

When we are confronted with real battle art, we may doubt the authenticity of what is depicted, but it never occurs to us to discuss its infantility. The picture we see is, after all, a documentation of military action. Or at least an individual interpretation of the subject. The precise proportions of truth and fantasy in such works are another matter.

Starting Over (2008) gives a perspective which is not immediately obvious: the cartoon camouflage does not alarm us, the characters are radiant with playful enthusiasm, and the drawn guns do not bring a lump of fear to our throats. ‘Nobody Dies’ was the name of an exhibition and simultaneously a succinct thesis, an unfailing law of the fictive world which is the setting of the action in Mr.’s pictures. Nobody dies, no harm is done to anyone, and the sticking plasters are merely decorative. We are slightly alarmed for these big-eyed girls, but this does not stop us finding the scene cute. And another thing: we are never shown a portrait of the enemy team. Who are these smiling girls aiming at? Perhaps it’s just all staged? Or is the artist raising an accusation of childishness, of a tendency to forget the recent experience of defeat?

Mr. depicts war as a game in which there is no antagonist. An innocent event in which no one’s blood gets spilt. That is no reproach. It is escapism. A deliberate infantilization of history – as a way of coping with its twists and turns. It is not for nothing that this exhibition included, alongside the playing at war, pictures that showed a game of pachinko (As I close my eyes, I See the Distant Arakawa River, the Faraway Sky, 2007). Pachinko is a popular type of game machine in Japan. ‘Lines of feeding troughs’, these machines make a 'Gotcha! Gotcha!' sound when you win, and pressing the lever on them gives you a de-realized dose of dopamine. In Japan even escapism is something into which people pour themselves in earnest: the players in the gaming arcade put as much hard work into perfecting their release of the ball as the artist has into painting the rhinestones on the guns brandished by the girls.

In the next room in the exhibition the cartoon figures in the pictures took on human flesh and blood. Here there were showings of a 37-minute film with the same title as the exhibition. The script, set, costumes, and directing were all by Mr. himself. The plot involved a team of five schoolgirls planning to take revenge on an ‘enemy’ team which has humiliated them. After choosing a strategy (Team Rabbit, 2008), ‘team rabbit’ puts on uniform and starts shooting at targets in a fit of bloodthirsty zeal. Mission complete, they can go home to their rooms, which are full to bursting with the kind of soft toys that are more standard for this age group. Compared to the painting described above, the playing at war recorded on film comes across as more literal, naïve, even clumsy. This is like people getting dressed up to play paintball and then someone for some reason deciding to make a documentary of it. It’s as if the study of escapism is no longer the main thing here. And with his absent-looking presence in the frame and choice of angles from which to film, this is further evidence for the voyeurism hinted at in Mr.’s pseudonym.

2011 was a turning point for Mr., and not just for him. On 11 March the fiercest earthquake in the history of Japan caused an accident at the Fukushima nuclear power station and a tsunami. The conjunction of natural cataclysm and nuclear catastrophe killed an enormous number of people and led to widespread destruction through the country’s north-east. Destruction of the nuclear reactor, of houses, cities, lives, and of people’s familiar way of life. The devastation became the main motif and theme in Mr.’s studies. Previously his work had not contained a single line that flickered; now his lines trembled and shook. It was as if the earth was vibrating under his feet as he worked. And perhaps it was.

In 2012 Mr. staged an exhibition called ‘Metamorphosis: Give Me Your Wings’ at Lehmann Maupin. This was an attempt to convey this feeling of the earth giving way under the feet of Japanese society as a whole. The exhibition’s main element was a massive installation depicting an accumulation of rubbish, remnants of furniture, household items, and odds and ends covering the region of Tohoku on one day.

These things were chaotically but carefully – and not without order – concentrated on a little island in the centre of the space, in the manner of the ‘heaps’ favoured by arte povera. As if at the wave of a magic wand, the objects had assembled to form a creature/charm/sculpture – the gentle spirit of catastrophe which helps victims to preserve pieces of their former life. Where previously there had been a room, there were now orphaned screens and columns of boxes, around and inside which strangers and viewers could stroll. The difference between internal and external had been eroded, drowned in the unrelenting waters. Home had been destroyed, and this was home not just as physical structure but as the mental basis upon which the Japanese depended. They had scarcely had time to recover from the collective devastation following the war; now, in March 2011, they had again had their privacy and calm stripped from them.

Here we see fragmentary glimpses of the immediacy typical of Mr.’s early works. The orderliness and virtuosity of figurative style used to depict the kawaii girls are painted over using layers of chaotic colour spots. Familiar faces fight for space with torn-up manuscripts, reportage photographs from the site of the explosion, newspaper spreads, and random graffiti. But still, to avoid loading the already heavy space with feelings of sorrow, Mr. incorporates the otaku DNA in the installation. The cute otaku subculture again becomes an intermediary with which the Japanese artist simplifies and strikes up dialogue with his western audience. As if all this is a way of getting the viewer ready for what Mr. will show three years later. The metamorphosis hinted at in the exhibition title was universally felt – by the Japanese consciousness, the artist’s consciousness, and the consciousness of viewers interacting with the objects in the gallery. Here Mr. brought about a transformation in himself, his style, and his ideas – in order to then transform the audience.

In 2016 Mr. filled the rooms of Perrotin’s Seoul gallery with the energy of destruction and chaos. The boundaries of the familiar white cube dissolved in a total immersive installation which, like a natural force, wiped out every last trace of the manmade. The objects and fragments of pictures spread out through the space as if in a painting by Rauschenberg. Content was no longer situated only opposite the viewer, on a vertical plane. Everything was happening everywhere, and the viewer could not help becoming a fully fledged participant in this (self)organized reservoir of fragments.

Tokyo, The City I Know, at Dusk: it’s Like a Hollow In my Heart is not a recreated piece of a room through which the tsunami has torn, but the storm inside, in cross-section. It is impossible to distinguish specific household objects here; even the different planes can barely be made out. We are reminded that there is a floor under our feet and a ceiling above our heads by a depiction of a metro carriage stuck onto one of the walls. The clean, almost empty carriage contrasts strongly with what is happening in the space round about. Of the Tokyo metro, known for its exceptional orderliness, all that remains is the feeling of unceasing movement into the depths – to some place, we don’t know where, in the direction of indeterminacy, carried by inertia, as after any major crisis.

A swirl of scraps, pieces, fragments, rags, sticks, chips shreds the viewer, leaving a sickening residue of anxiety and fear. It seems that the intensity of the chromatic range in Mr.’s ‘after’ pictures has been turned right down: the pure colours of the ‘before’ pictures have been messily mixed with one another, making them dirty (a nightmare for a colourist). The abundance of different hues has been covered up by layers of grainy dust. There is no sign of a human being here. Entropy has swallowed up space, and there is no one to keep it from spreading. The only person involved in what is happening is the artist, now an agent of entropy. Mr. tramples, tears, and burns his pictures, stains the drapes, and scratches the cardboard with something that was once kawaii. He reveals a hole in his heart and gives himself up to the process of destruction. He lets chaos be the main medium, allowing it to strip the value from what is already senseless and to dissolve the recognizable in the abstract.

The only thing that emerges intact from this (therapeutic) act of destruction is fantasy, myth, fiction. The heads of the anime girls float through the ruins of Tokyo, around a bishōjo (cute girl) growing out of fragments of sculpture. The bishōjo is a statue, an idol, an incarnation of moe (the affection one feels for anime or manga characters). And if someone, to cope, needs to bow down to a statue of a fictive character, let him or her continue to do so without shame. For jouhatsu (vanishing without trace – an alternative to suicide) there are many other occasions to be found.

Tokyo continued to be the subject of Mr.’s next projects. The city was healing, and fairly quickly. The post-shock stupefaction gave way to an abrupt boom. Every piece of space invariably filled up with something or was developed by someone. Life in whatever form flowed chaotically, and when tangible space was exhausted, it – life – inevitably began to layer. The pagodas of the imperial palace complex were joined by acute-angled, illuminated ‘glass boxes’; the city’s busy intersections narrowed without warning to the size of corridors a mere person wide; neon strips competed in the air with the spider’s webs of cables for the ancient streetlamps. Phenomena that were visual opposites were flattened to form a uniform, hypervisual background. You can see the same senseless energy of superfluity and simultaneity of everything-at-the-same-time radiated by superflat painting.

Mr.’s Oasis is unlike a secluded spot where you can slake your thirst. Nor is this somewhere where you can be sure that everything going on around you is not a mirage. Neon, graffiti, stickers, emojis, signs, display windows, covers, faces, shouts, slogans, and lots and lots of eyes, both cartoon and human… even when you are only interacting with this image through a screen, you’re at risk of suffering overload.

Superflat is often regarded as identical with pop art. Fair enough, you might think, given that, conceptually, both these phenomena derive from popular culture: their themes and characters are somehow based on what we have all inherited. However, in terms of technique, an analogue of the superflat surface existed several years before the earliest instances of pop art. Superflat can be compared with post-war American painting, which Clement Greenberg defined as ‘continuous’, ‘all-over’. Greenberg used this term above all to describe the work of Jackson Pollock. Like Pollock’s abstractions, superflat painting covers the entire space of the canvas in a uniform layer. Even if use is made of elements that are of different size, brightness, and style, they do not conflict with one another in terms of composition and significance. The surface of the painting is entirely devoid of hierarchy: everything is equally important, everything is in the ‘foreground’, everything is simultaneously eventless and eventful. Superflat is a concept and instrument that makes it possible to make sense of and adapt the Japanese visual system with its overabundance of signs.

It turns out that superflatness can be found even in Japanese shops – which is possibly why Mr. so often uses display windows and supermarket aisles as ‘background’. Japanese supermarkets are full of goods that contrast with one another in terms of design. Locally made foods – sake or mizu yokan (a type of jelly made from beans), for instance – are always presented in a traditional manner (unless wrapped in bamboo fibre or washi paper): understated design, elegant fonts, packaging containing minimal information. Imported goods, on the other hand, such as American candies or beer, look gaudy and bright and almost shout from the shelves. The merchandisers place opposites not in different corners but rubbing shoulders with one another.

This graphic eclecticism that grows out of layers of old and new, local and foreign, exists in, and in fact has roots in, Japanese writing. The Japanese use four different alphabets (kanji, hiragana, katakana, and Latin), each of which serves to indicate the origin of a thing.

Japanese trains and metro carriages contain a proliferating chaos of inscriptions and captions of all kinds. The advertisements in the trains are stuffed with information – and information written in a very small font. It’s quite possible that their designers are simply trying to entertain passengers who have to spend a substantial part of their day in crowded transport. In fact, though, this ubiquitous overload of visual sources cannot save people from boredom; and, then, it can be tiring.

Continuous stimuli from the external surroundings eclipse the picture of the external setting itself. This effect of the impossibility of forcing our way through their deafening veil was to be seen in Mr.’s works in his exhibition Melancholy Walk Around the Town (2019). On one of the walls a ‘veil’ functioned as the base for the paintings. A spoiled blue canvas used in street advertising was populated with an entire universe of figures making merry again the canonical background of Mount Fuji and Hokusai’s The Wave. In other universe-paintings round-eyed cartoon figures filled the display windows of the convenience stores with which we are already familiar. Did Mr. know that he was predicting one of the trends that would be a hot favourite with Asian TikTokers several years before they had even come into existence?

It’s not just smartphones and dialogue bubbles in comics that produce flurries of acoustic signals – but paintings by Mr. too. Bucchigiri!! Wrea!! Blink! Blink! Sweet! Love! Occurring energetically outside us in bid to distract and capture our attention, all this leads to a state of affect, of intoxication with the external content. Can reality be so intense? Or is this an otaku simulation? What should save us from boredom paradoxically produces a rich feeling of devastation and compels us to go into deeper isolation. Olivia Lang describes this phenomenon as ‘collective loneliness’ – an exclusive existential experience available to inhabitants of megalopolises.

Seclusion does not necessarily imply physical non-presence in external space, although Mr. too makes an attempt at metaphorical escape from the city to the tatami of his own bedroom (Quotidianist, 2021). However, this is merely a physical removal of himself from an uncomfortable environment. A similar experience of the loneliness of the large city is isolation of an interior kind – melancholy that makes us alien not simply to others but also to ourselves. Melancholy that ceases to be an automatic regime and becomes yet another adaptive mechanism.

To stroll through the city like a flaneur, it is necessary to capitulate before its unpitying intensity, to be hypnotized by it, to be deafened by its cries, to allow it to use you. In order at the end of the day to deliberately become alienated, to penetrate more deeply, to again discover oneself in oneself, so as to have the possibility to once again hear one’s thoughts. Thoughts that are as chaotic as the layers of the superflat painting The Expanse of the Galaxy in a Corner of an Alleyway (2021), the superflat culture, and the superflat environment.