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  Nicole Seymour Seymour thinks UCLA's Nick Lowe makes rad art. E-mail her at saintblue@hotmail.com. Click Here for more articles by Nicole Seymour

Recently, the Museum of Contemporary Art inaugurated its new MOCA gallery at the Pacific Design Center near Beverly Hills with “Superflat,” a collection of modern Japanese art organized by Takashi Murakami. While the exhibit contains a lot of thought-provoking and original work, it sadly seems to cater to sexist and racist artistic tropes, especially the idea of the docile, exploitable “China doll,” without examining or explaining these influences and images through the art itself or through any accompanying material.

One of the centerpieces of the exhibit is a series of dolls whose figures are molded after the familiar Japanese anime characters. And, in the same way that those cartoons often show female characters in physically exaggerated, degrading manners, the dolls are all fully or partially nude and posed lasciviously. One doll is twisted in such a manner that the viewer can see the word “IN” and an arrow which points up toward her vagina, painted on her pubic area. The obvious pornographic nature of these dolls is undeniable, but this is not the disturbing aspect – it is the notions behind it.

While one could debate that the dolls (perhaps unwittingly) show that much pornography renders women doll-like, these figures, in their connection to anime, exist as simply another medium through which to depict women in a degrading manner. The message and arrow also suggest that to be fucked is the very function of a woman – and to be fucked by a man; the heterosexist idea therein also suggests that women are objects for men, not partners to other women or single entities.

Moving through the exhibit, I found a series of drawings that were even more disturbing. This series depicts pre-pubescent girls in flirtatious, sexualized poses. They coyly look at the viewer while topless, they look astonished but amused as their skirts are flipped up, and they stick their fingers in their mouths like babies while splayed out, exposing their underpants. And in all of these depictions, not only are the girls disempowered by their presentation – being viewed, on display – but also by their behavior regarding this presentation; they are surprised, guileless.

  Illustration by JENNY YURSHANSKY/Daily Bruin

While of course these drawings cannot be categorized as child pornography (or criticized for being such, as obviously no children were involved), the connection with that kind of power dynamic is undeniable. The girls are in extremely stylized postures of submission and sexualization, while the greatest visual and visceral thrust of the art is the emphasis on their extreme youth, as evidenced through their lack of breasts, their childish gestures and their clothes.

The series that I found most offensive, however, were those pieces on the final wall of the gallery. One drawing shows a young girl melting, her face frozen in horror, her breasts in two melted piles on the ground. Another depicts a cute, cartoonish-faced child with the body of a caterpillar, which bears 20 pairs of large breasts and an exposed, dripping vagina. Perhaps the most grotesque is a drawing that shows a very young girl with nonsensically large breasts being attacked by a giant octopus, whose tentacles are squeezing her body as well as violating her sexually.

Whether they mean to or not, all of these images from the “Superflat” exhibit unfortunately go beyond mere sexism in their unrealistic, manipulated conceptions of females (without a single sexualized or even nude representation of a male) to the intersection of sexism and racism.

Unfortunately, because of varying reasons, many aspects of both American and Japanese culture view the Japanese female as an exotic, objectified and often infantilized Other. The stereotypes abound, from the images and text in pornography to film to songs like 2 Live Crew’s “Me So Horny,” painting Asian women as docile, accommodating and ready-and-willing sex toys. These portrayals make racist equations between being Asian and being weak, and sexist equations between being weak and being desirable.

By choosing to present art that utilizes or at least plays off of these sorts of concepts about Asian females, “Superflat” only reinforces and perpetuates them. Further, these portrayals can, intentionally or not, be taken to be a validation of some of these beliefs; racist and sexist ideals about Asian women that exist in American media and Western culture are pointedly not challenged in this forum, the same one that ironically and unfortunately has been billed as a representation of Asian art.

Beyond simply the physical exhibit, the “Superflat” catalogue sold at the gallery is chock-full of images that endlessly repeat these ideas of the titillating, helpless schoolgirl (the schoolgirl being one persona that is recycled throughout the entire catalog), the sexualized child and the sexually submissively Asian woman – from Aya Takano’s falling and contorted naked female children to Chiho Aosima’s young cheerleader splayed upside down to display her crotch to the viewer.

“Superflat” does contain much valuable, innovative work – at least half of it does not reflect the mentioned problematic artistic themes. Instead it offers things like groovisions’ “Chappies” a collection of identical, life-sized automaton workers that seem to be commenting on the ritualized, regimented Japanese – or is it American? – social and work culture, and Yoshitomo Nara’s paintings of big-headed, slightly sinister-looking little girls, which subvert notions of childhood “goodness.”

But what would be truly subversive in this exhibit, and in art altogether, would be to forego depictions and notions of Asian women and women in general as witless, precocious sex toys, and to refuse to glorify the artistic sexualization of children. What “Superflat” makes obvious is the need to produce an effective counter-dialogue that conceives women as full-grown, autonomous adults, and does not limit this conception to white women. As it is, though, much of it differs little from typical pornography, which is often inherently subjective and race-based.

This is not to say the relation of any of these art pieces to pornography warrants censorship, or that either genre should automatically be disparaged on the basis of its sexual nature. Nothing could be farther from the truth; pornography does have cultural value (even if it is only as a reflection of its given society), and sexualized depictions can have much to say about gender roles and norms.

What is truthful, however, is that much of the art in “Superflat” adds nothing to dialogues about such important issues as gender, sexuality, gaze, subjectivity or the ethics of representation. It simply capitalizes on its shock factor while furthering tired misogynist, racist and imperialistic ideas. But, lucky for it, “Superflat” can validate itself by coming in an “artistic” – and thus socially viable – package.