PHOENIX – Phoenix Art Museum is now presenting Mr.: You Can Hear the Song of This Town, the first U.S. solo exhibition in more than five years to exclusively showcase the work of Mr., one of today’s most popular Japanese artists. The show will be on view in the museum’s Steele Gallery through March 12, 2023. Spanning the late 1990s to 2022, the exhibition features nearly 50 paintings, drawings, sculptures and video works, including a recent museum acquisition and a new 30-foot-long canvas that will enjoy its world premiere at Phoenix Art Museum. These vivid and often chaotic works — a large selection of which were created in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic — draw influence from anime, manga and virtual fantasy worlds to examine themes of desire, tragedy and psychological anguish.

“During this particular moment in history, marked by turbulent current events nationally and abroad
that are reshaping the ways we interact with each other and how we reflect on our respective societies,
Mr.: You Can Hear The Song of This Town provides insight into the mind of an artist who uses his
practice to respond to global tragedies while exploring his own anxieties, frustrations and angst,” said
Jeremy Mikolajczak, the Sybil Harrington director and CEO of Phoenix Art Museum. “We are excited to
present this compelling body of work — a reminder of art’s power to help us explore complex emotions
that affect individuals across cultures — as we continue the museum’s mission of creating points of
connection and uniting people of different backgrounds through various forms of artistic expression.”

A self-described member of the otaku subculture — characterized by obsessive interests in anime,
manga, video games and other forms of Japanese popular culture — Mr. creates paintings, sculptures,
videos and installations that explore his personal fantasies and represent a wider reflection on solitude,
fear, desire and trauma. Informed by manga (a genre of Japanese art that includes comics and graphic
novels) and anime (derived from the English term “animation” and used for cartoons in Japan), the
artist’s works feature kawaii (or “cute”) style characters with wide eyes, colorful hair and round,
childlike faces that are meant to evoke feelings of moe (a profound adoration of or infatuation with
fictional figures).

These cartoonish subjects are often set against graffiti-like backdrops, which echo the traumatic loss of life in Japan during both World War II and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. “Mr. is most closely associated with Superflat, the post-modern art movement founded by the artist Takashi Murakami, with whom Mr. worked for a number of years before pursuing his individual practice,” said Gilbert Vicario, curator of modern and contemporary art at Phoenix Art Museum. “Mr.’s neo-pop work, however, descends from an even larger art-historical framework, drawing influence from 19th-century ukiyo-e prints, Pop Art and abstract expressionism. He combines these influences with elements of Japanese popular culture and references he has gleaned from the internet, presenting them in fine art to examine the social mores of Japanese society and a global community obsessed with social media.”

Mr.: You Can Hear the Song of This Town is the first U.S. exhibition dedicated solely to the artist’s work
since the 2014 Seattle Art Museum exhibition Live On: Mr.’s Japanese Neo-pop. Organized by Phoenix
Art Museum, You Can Hear the Song of This Town invites visitors to explore Mr.’s vivid, imagined
universe. The exhibition showcases nearly 50 works created during the past two decades, illuminating the artist’s stylistic evolution. Older works from the early 2000s to the mid-2010s feature brightly colored
characters with a doe-eyed innocence, while paintings and drawings from 2018 onward mark a dramatic
shift in tone and composition. Various works dated 2021 — created during the height of the COVID-19
pandemic — depict solitary, kawaii-style characters in black and white. Devoid of the light, cheerful
expressions characteristic of the artist’s larger oeuvre, these figures perhaps reflect the loneliness,
isolation, anger and confusion millions of people around the world felt as they sheltered in place for
months in an attempt to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus.

The exhibition’s sole video work, however, demonstrates that the motivations behind Mr.’s artwork
have long remained the same although his visual aesthetic has shifted with the passage of time. Created in 1998, the self-produced video features the artist moving through various poses with a samurai sword and was created following a break-up, reminding viewers that Mr. has always channeled feelings of anguish and anxiety — personal and collective — into his artwork.

Visit the website of the Phoenix Art Museum and see its dedicated page for Mr.: You Can Hear the Song of This Town.