Wide-eyed world of childhood fantasy

Tokyo artist Shintaro Miyake dresses up as a giant teddy bear and darws on the walls. Picture / Fotopress

Japanese artist Shintaro Miyake spent the first week of Mixed-Up Childhood dressed in a cartoon-ish bear suit. He took strolls in Albert Park, visited the Lantern Festival and Teddy Bears' picnic and, between outings, worked in the New Gallery, scrawling child-like pictures with waving spaghetti limbs over the gallery walls as part of his performance/installation, Kumao.

As well as being furnished with extra-furry carpet and teddy-bear wallpaper, Kumao has hundreds of stuffed bears piled against the wall and a monitor showing a costumed Miyake trying to prepare breakfast.

With oversized paws, he clumsily peels oranges, opens tinned fruit, makes toast and slices a tomato with a large cleaver. Of course, lashings of honey are served, too.

Another key ingredient in Miyake's work is his number one girl, the character Sweet-san. She is his fantasy muse and has appeared in most of his drawings for the past six years. Like Miyake's other characters, she has the super-cute childlike characteristics typical of Japanese manga cartoons, with a button nose, over-sized head, pigtails, and large round eyes.

Miyake likes to inhabit his work, assuming a role in pictures he draws and creating a home for the characters and the drawings to live in. As well as the bear character he created for Mixed-Up Childhood he has also dressed as a blue, cloud-covered figure with elongated ears held up by balloons, a pink Godzilla, Darth Vader and C3-PO.

By engaging in street theatre, Miyake's character, as well as providing a persona to separate and buffer the artist from his work and audience, is an alluring go-between, enabling an instant connection.

Appropriately costumed, Miyake becomes part of the child's world, bypassing any negotiation of the distance often present in adult-child interaction. Anyone who has seen a Disney-style parade of characters will have noticed children mob dressed-up characters, oblivious to the figure inside the suit, uninhibited in how they interact with them.

This establishes a context for the live painting and drawing that is central to Miyake's work. This way, many of his pictures, whether on the wall or on paper, are generated by his characters as part of the constant production that is a feature of his performances.

He has also said that by becoming a character, he assumes the responsibility to perform to expectation, and this makes him work harder.

It also gives him access to the wild-eyed world of innocent fantasy most of us have long since left behind.

* The arts Guide will present a weekly introduction to the artists represented in Mixed-Up Childhood.

Exhibition

* Who: Shintaro Miyake in Mixed-Up Childhood
* Where and when: New Gallery, to May 29