Before visitors enter the Dikeou Collection on the fifth floor of the Colorado Building, they encounter Misaki Kawai’s Mars Investigation Laboratory installation in the building’s lobby. For as massive as the piece is (it couldn’t fit in the elevator to make up to the galleries), few people make mention of it until they see her Untitled (Large Plane), at which point they exclaim, “Oh! This is by the same artist who made that piece downstairs.” Misaki’s style is so distinct that first time viewers can identify her work without even being that familiar with it. Her artwork is an honest reflection of her personality; she believes art should be fun and she values imagination and integrity over technique. On the surface her execution may appear rough and puerile, but anyone who has personally handled, assembled, or physically been inside of these artworks can vouch for how expertly crafted they are. Her familial and cultural background, along with her collector’s mentality, provide the groundwork of her aesthetic, but it is her ability to shun convention and create by her own rules that has made her a stand-out artist in the saturated New York scene.

Misaki’s father was an architect who painted for a hobby while her mother made clothes and puppets. She went to art school in Kyoto and then moved to New York to start her career. In her biography she is compared to Atsuko Tanaka and Yayoi Kusama via her use of color, pattern, and material, but another rich area of Japanese aesthetics that Misaki draws from is heta-uma, “an anime-derived method that risks amateur aesthetics by embracing basic expression.” Heta-uma loosely translates to unskillful but skillful, or as Misaki describes it, “bad technique, good sense,” and was coined in the 1980s by a Japanese illustrator named Teruhiko Yuasa. The style gained traction in the mid-1970s when Japan experienced an economic resurgence and stable political atmosphere. Artists were eager to experiment and assimilated with mainstream culture.

Illustration by Teruhiko Yuasa

Painting by Suzy Amakane

Prevalent characteristics of heta-uma artwork include loud colors, visceral line work, bent perspective, and odd proportions. Scenes are humorous, but also involve violent and/or sexual fantasy. Manic people, bootlegish pop-culture characters, and bizarre imaginary creatures populate the spectacle. In America, heta-uma would fall somewhere along the spectrum between art brut and kitsch, but it is too deliberate and conscious in approach to follow the latter and tends to be more subversive and deranged than the former. Heta-uma is its own brand of weirdness that only the island-dwellers of Japan could concoct, and Misaki Kawai has carved her own niche within this particular genre.

Mars Lab, detail

Large Plane, detail

Large Plane andMars Lab are heta-uma in the sense that they eschew any serious subject matter or commentary and the zany environments look more like something out of a child’s fantasy than art made by an adult. The human characters inside these environments have elongated bodies with torsos that turn into heads with no necks or shoulders, tiny, spindly appendages, and mops of fur for hair. The characters’ faces are photos of people she knows, admires, or of herself (think of those bootleg references). The mad scientists in Mars Lab breed yellow Furby creatures, while members of The Beatles ride first class in Large Plane with a caged gorilla in the back while four versions of Misaki aimlessly pilot the craft. All of the fabrics used in these installations are second-hand and mismatched, clashing with one another and creating a dizzy optical effect; the eye can hardly stay focused, instilling wonder and confusion. Traditionally, heta-uma is two-dimensional, appearing in anime and manga, but Misaki brings the style into the three-dimensional realm, thrusting these miniature yet also mammoth worlds into our reality.

One can’t help but be charmed by the light-hearted innocence that emanates from Misaki’s artwork, but she doesn’t shy away from the risque elements that are a part of heta-uma. Issues of Playboy and internet porn can be found on the plane, and she portrays nudity and other suggestive imagery in other artworks, but exercises enough restraint to keep viewers happily engaged instead of shy away. In broad terms, a lot of Japanese pop art is either cutesy or lurid, but Misaki effortlessly balances this dichotomy, making her an innovator in this particular genre. Heta-uma is still an underground movement, but Misaki’s art moves easily in the public domain, from venues like the Museum of Modern Art in Japan to the Children’s Museum of the Arts in NYC. By fusing the familiar and the domestic with her relentless imagination and quirky techniques, she is able to introduce the heta-uma art form to people of all ages around the globe.

-Hayley Richardson