[1] Lauren Elder, Rachael Milton, and Sua Yoo, “HIRO ☆ Artist Book, Comic, and Sculptures by Lauren Elder, Rachael Milton and Sua Yoo ☆ 2014,” Hiro Universe, 2014.

[2] Elder, Milton, and Yoo.

[3] Lauren Elder, Rachael Milton, and Sua Yoo, Hiro (Los Angeles, 2014).

[4] Christine R. Yano, Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2013).

[5]“Healthgoth,” in Aesthetic Wiki, accessed May 18, 2017.

[6] Elizabeth Legge, “When Awe Turns to Awww... Jeff Koon’s Balloon Dog and the Cute Sublime,” in The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, ed. Joshua Paul Dale et al. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 142.

[7] Alicia Eler and Kate Durbin, “The Teen-Girl Tumblr Aesthetic,” Hyperallergic (blog), March 1, 2013.

[8] “One Million Kingdoms,” Guggenheim (blog), January 1, 2001.

[9] David Ehrlich, “From Kewpies to Minions: A Brief History of Pop Culture Cuteness,” Rolling Stone, July 21, 2015, para. 2.

[10] Leigh Alexander, “The Y2K Aesthetic: Who Knew the Look of the Year 2000 Would Endure?,” The Guardian, May 19, 2016, sec. Technology. The popular Tumblr blog Institute for Y2K Aesthetics is often credited with coining and disseminating the term.

[11] “BRONZE COLLECTION,” Tom Sachs, 2008.

[12] Yano, Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific.

[13] Tomiko Yoda, “A Roadmap to Millenial Japan,” in Japan After Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present, ed. Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2006), 46.

[14] Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: The Death of Nature and the Apotheosis of Trash; or, Rubbish Ecology,” PMLA 123, no. 2 (March 1, 2008): 321–39.

Hiro Universe is a collaborative art project which began in 2014, by Lauren Elder, Rachel Milton, and Sua Yoo, all three born in 1990 and based in Chicago and Los Angeles. The project, including objects, paintings, comics, an e-book, and an app, “traverses the gap between the physical and virtual, industry and fandom, character and creator.”[2] This transmediality is reflected by their installation in gallery shows, in which with a customized plinth incorporating different outputs from the project. [Figure 1a, b] On the website and e-book’s short introductory text, the artists are presented as a group of weeaboo (“wannabe Japanese”) friends, lazing around in their bedroom when a fantastic event takes place. This introduction situates Lauren, Rachel, and Sua, along with their artworks, as characters and artifacts within their an eight-page fantasy comic drawn by Yoo in pastiche manga style, [Figure 2] available as an e-book called Hiro.minified, an abridged version of the more in-depth publication Hiro.[3] [Figure 3] Filled with references to familiar animescapes, the girls feed on mochi (a kind of Japanese glutinous rice cake) and listen to the sound of cicadas, which often appears in anime as a marker of seasonality. The Hiro comic book introduces the mythology that binds together their transdisciplinary project, an expression of the artists’ uncanny visions of what Christine Yano calls “pink globalization,” i.e., “the spread of goods and images labeled cute (kawaii) from Japan to other parts of the industrial world”[4] via supersigns such as Hello Kitty and other anime characters. Hiro is thus an abstract but emotion-packed science-fantasy tale, seen through the lens of a dark, sexual post-humanism, digital aesthetics, and trashy celebrity culture. The story revolves around a group of cute warrior girls in skimpy but highly accessorized getups, equipped with smartphones, tribal tattoos, and millennial lingo. Hiro’s characters are rendered in Yoo’s trademark style, mixing moé anime girls with Internet-bred aesthetics subcultures, like health goth—a fashion combining goth culture with “trans-humanism, Net art, technical sportswear, bionic body parts, combat gear and an understanding of whole body and mental health.”[5] [Figure 4]

Along the way, several mystical artifacts are introduced, which are existing tridimensional artworks by Elder and Milton. Hiro, for instance, is a bean-shaped creature with healing powers, evoking the merchandisable cute familiars common in anime and manga series, like those of the magical girl variety. [Figure 5] The Ojōsama statuettes are jagged bishōjo figures in plaster, cement, ceramic and glass, available in several colors such as limelight and powder (“ojōsama” meaning “young girl” or “rich girl,” is a term referring to wealthy female animanga characters). [Figure 6] The Portrait of Melancholy is a vertical steel bar with an irregular ceramic plaque glued to its upper end, [Figure 7] featuring a rough sketch of Haruhi Suzumiya’s face—the popular heroine of the cult anime series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (Suzumiya Haruhi no Yūutsu, first aired in 2006). [Figure 8] In turn, Hello Kitty on Moai Island is a brutalist rendition of the Sanrio’s mascot Kitty White. [Figure 9] Additionally, the Hiro photo app, available from the Hiro Universe website (http://hiro-universe.com/), allows users to stick cute vector graphics onto their own photographs and pictures. The vector graphics resemble nail decals or teeny temporary tattoos of flowers, bows, strawberries, cherries, and butterflies. Along with photographic reproductions of Elder and Milton’s artifacts, these graphics appear in the Hiro comic book, arranged into a pattern on the inside cover and back cover.

The Hiro Universe “merchandise,” like figures and apps, thus parodies the sleek media mix of the otaku culture industry, reproducing the logic of transmedia convergence on a do‑it‑yourself scale. Instead of finding these mass-cultural references in otaku rooms or the shelves of Akihabara (Tokyo’s otaku neighboorhood), from which they originally stem, with Hiro, they are destined for the niche of western art galleries. In the same vein, the “About the Authors” section on the Hiro Universe website contrasts the artists’ statements, written in complex academic language, with portraits of Elder, Milton, and Yoo as cute animanga girls. [Figure 10] Like the cast of an anime show, each girl sports her personality and costume, drawing from the recognizable stock characters in anime and manga, mixed in with subcultural fashion elements. Yoo’s cute‑cool health goth fashion, including the obligatory FILA shoes and a Mickey Mouse cap; Elder’s sassy ojōsama loose socks and tsundere (“tough outside, soft inside”) look on her face; Milton’s crop top with the word “otaku” written in katakana characters and shy tareme “drooping eyes.” The contrast between the artists’ statements and their animanga portraits short‑circuits prevailing notions of cuteness as “a dumb aesthetic.”[6] Much like other women artists in the contemporary art world and culture more generally, the reclamation of the cute and the pretty serves as a guerrilla strategy against hegemonic phallogocentrism. See, in this respect, artist Alicia Eler and writer Kate Durbin article “The Teen-Girl Tumblr Aesthetic,”[7] about the aesthetics of adolescence shared online by teenage girls and young adult women on “safe spaces” like Tumblr.

Moreover, the references to anime, manga, and otaku fan culture deliberately jab at the Western-centered notions of the avant-garde—it is not just cute; it is kawaii.  Historically, the first Western artworld project to employ animanga visuals was Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno’s No Ghost Just a Shell (1999-2002), nearly 20 years ago. Huyghe and Parreno (born in 1962 and 1964, respectively) acquired the legal rights to an unremarkable manga character called Annlee, “rescuing” her from the corporate environment where she was destined to fade away and disappear. Huyghe and Parreno each produced individual pieces staring Annlee: Anywhere Out of the World (2000) and One Million Kingdoms (2001). They also “commissioned” other established artists to use Annlee free of charge, gathering an impressive group of art world stars: Henri Barande, Francois Curlet, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Joseph with Mehdi Belhaj-Kacem, Melik Ohanian, Richard Phillips, Joe Scanlan, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Anna-Léna Vaney. The title, No Ghost Just a Shell, is a pun on both Oshii Mamoru’s sci-fi anime masterpiece Ghost In The Shell, and “ghost in the machine,” a phrase coined by British philosopher Gilbert Ryle to describe René Descartes' mind-body dualism. Also, in the art poster produced by the creative communication agency M/M (Paris) for the project, they substituted the word “shell” for the logo of the oil supermajor Royal Dutch Shell, [Figure 11] suggesting that the global commodification, circulation, and appropriation of signs has reduced the value system of Western modernity (e.g., Enlightenment rationalism, Cartesian dualism) to a corporate simulacrum—and that the (then, emerging) Japanization of Western media played a critical role in this dethroning.

Huyghe and Parreno’s visions of cybercapitalist postmodernity are presented in their works. Huyghe’s short animated film One Million Kingdoms (2001, color video installation with sound, 7 minutes) shows a ghostly Annlee reduced to luminous contour lines, wandering on her way to nowhere in a land of mountains and craters. [Figure 12] She is represented in primitive computer graphics, reminiscent of old systems as the ZX Spectrum. The ground on which Annlee walks is continually shifting in reaction to the synthesized voice of astronaut Neil Armstrong, who narrates a story mixing the real transmissions from the Apollo 11 mission with selections from Jules Verne’s Voyage au Center de la Terre.[8] As the boundaries between history and fiction, past and future, are blurred, Annlee becomes a wandering spirit in a state of suspended death, destined to disappear in a mediasphere overloaded with spectacular images. In turn, Parreno’s Anywhere Out of the World (2000, color video installation with sound, 4 minutes) is a “videotaped” confession by Annlee, set against a black backdrop, in which she talks about herself in a cynic, disenchanted manner. After stating that her name is Annlee and that “you can spell it however you want, it doesn’t matter,” as if renouncing her right to complete personhood, she explains how she was bought for 46 000 yen from the catalog of a Japanese studio called Kworks.

“Some other characters had the possibility of becoming a hero,” Annlee says in a regretful voice. “They had a long psychological description, a personal history, the material to produce a narration. They were really expensive, and I was cheap. Designed to join any kind of story, but with no chance to survive any of them”. And concludes: “I was never designed to survive.” Portrayed as a victim of the “cuteness‑industrial complex,”[9] Annlee’s commodity cycle turns into a poignant life story meant to elicit our empathy. “It true, everything I’m saying it’s true,” she urges, asserting the “reality” of this first-person account of commodity cruelty, and adds sarcastically: “Some names have been changed to preserve the guilty.” As the camera closes on her blank yet uncannily emotional stare, she continues her (Parreno’s) statement: “I am a product. A product freed from the marketplace I was supposed to fill.” At one point, Annlee grabs a picture of her original self, before Parreno redesigned her into a 3D model, changing her features to resemble an alien. [Figure 13] “It’s like when you point out an old photo,” she comments and shows it to the camera. Later on, we learn that even Annlee’s voice is not her own, but that of a human model called Danielle. Annlee-Danielle explains that “She is not used to speaking,” pointing at their common objectification: both Annlee, the corporate character, and the human fashion model have their bodies thoroughly commodified, shaped and reshaped, and subjugated to the tyranny of product trends.

To some extent, No Ghost Just a Shell illustrates an “outsider” mentality that externalizes the viewer from Japanese pop culture, betraying the artists’ belonging to a generation of Europeans that did not grow up immersed in Cool Japan: manga, anime, Japanese videogames and fashion. One may say that, although animanga aesthetics are at the core of Huyghe and Parreno’s project, it does not exude a genuine taste for or familiarity with manga and anime per se. Instead, No Ghost Just a Shell reflects the Y2K aesthetic from the mid-90s to the early 2000s, coincident with the dotcom bubble and preceding the “war on terror” after 9/11; a look which The Guardian writer Alexander Leigh describes in terms of “Synthetic or metallic-looking materials, inflatable furniture, moon-boot footwear and alien-inspired hairstyles.”[10] Indeed, at the time of Huyghe and Parreno’s project, Ghost In The Shell, which had premiered in 1995, enjoyed a renewed popularity with Wamdue Project’s hit song “King of My Castle” (1999), whose music video featured excerpts from the film. [Video 1] Parreno’s redesigned Annlee also captures the coeval alien craze circulating, for instance, in television advertisement like Playstation’s 1999 “alien girl” commercial. [Figure 14]

Contrary to what happens in Hiro Universe, in No Ghost Just a Shell, there are no references to specific animanga scenarios or tropes. In fact, the modus operandi of No Ghost Just a Shell relied on offering up Annlee to contemporary artists who are “outsiders” of the Japanese culture industry, to see the result of the culture shock between West and Japan, “high art” and mass culture. One finds this same rationale, for instance, in the monumental sculptures of Hello Kitty, Melody and Miffy by American artist Tom Sachs (b. 1966). [Figure 15] In Sachs’s words:

Like Huyghe and Parreno, what draws Sachs to characters like Hello Kitty is their being icons of glossy, pure producthood (or shells without a ghost, to put it poetically) that they can deconstruct, e.g., by making the giant bronze sculptures look like they are made of foam core). As such, their engagement with Japanese popular culture is arguably more programmatic and detached than Hiro Universe’s “messier” tactics. The generation gap between Huyghe, Parreno, and Sachs and younger artists Elder, Milton, and Yoo partially accounts for these different stances. However, even today, among millennial artists (born between 1981-1996), not all references to Japanese pop culture are “involved.” For instance, in the case of Michael Pybus, an English artist born in 1982, his work makes extensive use of Japanese pop culture in ways similar to No Ghost Just a Shell and Sachs’s sculptures of Hello Kitty. Pybus mostly references mascots from popular Japanese franchises like Super Mario or Pokémon: Pikachu, Meowth, Yoshi, or human characters like Misty, Jessie, Nurse Joy or Princess Peach. He deploys these characters alongside other global brands and pop culture icons: Ikea, Disney or Looney Tunes characters, Lara Croft, MTV, Microsoft Windows, and so on. Pybus also explicitly aligns with the Pop Art tradition by reproducing, in his trademark “flat,” “direct,” or “simple” acrylic paint style, famous artworks by Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney, or Christopher Wool, as well as the Japanese icons of Superflat art, like Murakami Takashi’s laughing flower sculptures. In mashing these symbols of contemporary art—including the logo of the Art Now book series by Taschen—with global brands in jarring collages, Pybus explores the gaps and continuities between the art market and the popular entertainment industry, “high art” aura and the appeal of mass fashion and design. [Figure 16a, b]

In No Ghost Just a Shell, as well as the artworks by Sachs and Pybus, these cute-cool superstars “made in Japan” are used to represent an overarching global consumer culture, including the more recent processes of “pink globalization,”[12] with their worldwide spread of kawaii aesthetics. In this sense, no further knowledge of anime, manga, videogames, or fandoms outside the mainstream is necessary for the audience to grasp these works’ significance. Nor do the artists appear to come from within particular groups or subcultures, as in Hiro Universe. Note that such “detachment” does not mean that the works are less profound, or any less relevant to our understanding of the role and mechanics of Japanese pop culture in the world. On the contrary, No Ghost Just a Shell offers us one of the most potent evocations of (now) widely circulated concepts such as the kyara (cute commercial mascots) and the media mix (the Japanese implementations of convergence culture and transmediality), which have shaped and continue to be developed in otaku-oriented culture industries.  But the fact that in the process Annlee is “freed” or “saved” from her original animanga milieu reveals the artists’ separation from the source material.

In contrast, Elder, Milton, and Yoo even portray themselves as animanga characters, showing that, as artists, they could not be more inside the Hiro Universe. As such, Hiro Universe belongs to a trend in contemporary art reflecting what Yoda Tomiko calls the J-subculturation of millennials: “Rather than assuming that Japanese popular culture today ultimately refers to some form of a larger national frame, we may understand the prefix J- as inscribing the subculturation of the national.”[13] This trend is visible in works of many western visual artists, for instance, Nichole Shinn, Sven Loven, Yannick Val Gesto, or Bill Hayden. [Figure 17] Shinn’s digital collages, for example, showcase her familiarity with the language and trends of animanga fandoms. In Kiss Me (TXTbook, 2018), [Figure 18] a 64-page-long artist book about the early Internet-based phenomenon of Kisekae Set System (basically, virtual anime-themed paper dolls), Shinn’s collages alternate with various fanart of popular female anime characters, drawn in a deliberately unskilled MS Paint-style reminiscent of the amateur creations in online communities, like DeviantArt. These characters, while well-known among fans of anime and manga, are not recognizable to a broader Western audience like Hello Kitty and Pikachu. Therefore, characters like Sailor Moon’s Black Lady, Bleach’s Rukia, Evangelion’s Misato, or Shōjo Kakumei Utena’s Utena, demand their audience’s J-subculturation in order to be recognized. Shinn’s fan arts also include Scully from X-Files and Xena: Warrior Princess, nodding towards the millennial’s nostalgia for the “90s experience.”

The paintings of Swedish artist Sven Loven (b. 1979, Stockholm) are less specific than Shinn’s in their reference to anime and manga, but still explore the dirty yet nostalgic mediatic milieu that we find in Hiro Universe. Loven’s acrylic paintings emulate messy computer graphics as if the images were smudged and blurred with Photoshop brushes, or the lines embossed or “neonified” with digital filters. Remnants of Japanese characters like Sailor Moon and Sonic the Hedgehog, furries, GeoCities GIFs, katakana and kaomoji (Japanese-style emoticons style) are juxtaposed to other icons of the 1980s and 1990s nostalgia, such as Home Alone or old Motorola phones. [Figure 19] Japanese pop culture thus becomes entangled with Internet cyberculture, videogames, and memes, not merely as a super-symbol of globalization, but also as a subcultural marker of millennial phantasmagoria. We find this same strategy in the digital paintings of Belgian artist Yannick Val Gesto (b. 1987). [Figure 20] His most recent artist’s book, Close Both Eyes to See (Chambre Charbon, 2019), compiling an extensive collection of the artist's drawings, sketches, collages, and virtual photographies, features a broad range of “subcultural” gaming and animanga references, from the online RPG Phantasy Star Online and Nintendo’s Xenoblade Chronicles to moé anime and manga series like K-On!, YuruYuri, and Yotsuba&!. [Figure 21] Like Loven and Shinn’s works, these Japanese pop-cultural references blend seamlessly with a whole other variety of coeval expressions, from 1990s televisions shows to cult fantasy and sci-fi worlds, creating the impressions of a melting pot or stream of conscious from the raw millennial collective imaginary.

In short, Hiro Universe and No Ghost Just a Shell are collaborative projects among two or more artists incorporating Japanese pop culture, namely, kawaii and animanga aesthetics. However, both projects illustrate two different approaches to this subject matter in contemporary art: we may term it a poetic of the “macro” or mainstream, and the “micro” or subcultural trend. Projects like No Ghost Just a Shell and Tom Sachs’s Hello Kitty sculptures deal with super symbols (“macro”), while Hiro Universe emphasizes the role of cuteness and anime and manga—sometimes, referencing specific characters—in millennial subcultures (“micro”). The latter demands that viewers are familiar with, or even knowledgeable of, Japanese pop culture and cyber microgenres like vaporwave and health goth. These different stances tend to reflect a gap between generation X and the millennials, although this is not always the case (Michael Pybus is an example of a millennial artist whose work focuses on the “macro” Japaneseness of globalized entertainment cultures). What Hiro Universe and No Ghost Just a Shell do have in common, besides their use of animanga characters, is a shared interest in both collaboration and DIY ethic. That is, a practice of art that, unlike the sleek transmediality of large entertainment franchises, embraces the time attached of objects, their embeddedness in interpersonal relationships, their history, and consequently, their processual hiccups and even their degradation (e.g., the smudged, the dirty, the broken)—what Sachs calls a form of “bricolage,” that also applies, for instance, to amateur fan art. Unlike the glossy, picture-perfect aesthetics popularized by artists like Murakami Takashi, the use-value of the kawaii and animanga aesthetics in Western contemporary art seems to be tied to the “rubbish ecology”[14] of postmodernity, to collecting the bits and scraps of late capitalist commodities, what is gone or rejected, hanging on the threshold of the salvageable.

See in CUTENCYCLOPEDIA – Grimes, Nokia, Yolandi, Poppy & Gaijin Mangaka.

See in PORTFOLIO – Autumn & Trance Dream Techno.

REFERENCES in Hiro Universe.