[1] Adrian Favell, Before and after Superflat: A Short History of Japanese Contemporary Art, 1990-2011 (Hong Kong: Blue Kingfisher, 2011), 222.

[2] Favell, 13.

[3] Favell, 223.

[4] Andrew Lee, “Takashi Murakami: A Reluctant Homecoming,” The Japan Times, 2016.

[5] Yoshitomo Nara, Q&A: Yoshitomo Nara Seeks Lasting Art After Japan’s Tsunami, interview by Wei Gu, May 13, 2015.

[6] Nastia Voynovskaya, “On View: Yoshitomo Nara’s ‘Stars’ at Pace Gallery,” Hi-Fructose Magazine (blog), April 3, 2015.

[7] “Yoshitomo Nara ‘Stars,’” Pace Gallery, February 5, 2015.

[8] Michael H. Miller, “It Came From Outer Space! Mariko Mori Comes Back Down to Earth,” Observer (blog), November 16, 2011.

[9] “Rebirth: Recent Work by Mariko Mori - Press Release,” Streaming Museum, September 11, 2013.

[10] Megan Arkenberg, “Cuteness and Control in Portal,” in The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness, ed. Joshua Paul Dale et al. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 63.

[11] Elizabeth Leigh, “Superflat Artist Aya Takano's Sea Change, Post-Tsunami,” BlouinArtinfo, November 29, 2012.

[12] Leigh.

[13] “Aya Takano ‘The Jelly Civilization Chronicle’” (Galerie Perrotin, March 16, 2017).

[14] “Artists Paints - Is Oil or Acrylic Friendlier to Environment?,” Consumer Action, May 23, 2010.

[15] Kaikai Kiki, “Chiho Aoshima Solo Exhibition: Rebirth of the World,” Kaikai Kiki Gallery (blog), 2016.

[16] Jen Graves, “Big Screen, Big Scream,” The Stranger, July 1, 2015.

[17] Kaikai Kiki, “Chiho Aoshima Solo Exhibition: Rebirth of the World.”

[18] Emakimono are painted horizontal handscrolls crafted during the eleveth to sixteeh centuries in Japan, used to illustrate epic tales, like Genji monogatari, or for social satyr “Emakimono,” accessed September 25, 2018.

[19] Takashi Murakami, Takashi Murakami on Making Art After the Tsunami, interview by Interview By Jay Caspian Kang, Newspaper article from The New York Times Magazine, December 5, 2014.

[20] Murakami.

[21] Murakami.

[22] Murakami.

[23] Therese Möllenhoff, Murakami by Murakami or “exhibitions within the exhibition” at Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley Museet, interview by Arterritory, February 24, 2017.

[24] Möllenhoff.

[25] Jason Farago, “Takashi Murakami Review: A Welcome Return to a More Disturbing Style,” The Guardian, November 11, 2014, sec. Art and design.

[26] Ben Davis, “Takashi Murakami Enters His Skull Period,” Artnet News (blog), November 13, 2014.

[27] Howard Halle, “Takashi Murakami, ‘In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow,’” Time Out New York, December 19, 2014.

[28] Charles Darwent, “IoS Visual Art Review: Mariko Mori: Rebirth, Royal Academy, London,” The Independent, December 16, 2012.

[29] Graves, “Big Screen, Big Scream.”

[30] As Kolnai explains, “By ‘moral’ here we understand not ‘ethical’ in a strict and narrow sense, but rather: mental or spiritual, albeit more or less with reference to ethical matters, in contrast to physical” (Kolnai 2003, 62).

[31] Jonathan Yee and Eileen Kinsella, “Why Collectors Love Takashi Murakami, Part 2,” artnet News, November 14, 2014.

[32] Aurel Kolnai, On Disgust, ed. Barry Smith and Carolyn Korsmeyer, New edition edition (Chicago: Open Court, 2003).

[33] Walter Robinson, “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism,” Artspace, April 3, 2014.

[34] Raphael Rubinstein, “Provisional Painting,” Art in America (blog), May 1, 2009.

[35] Sharon L. Butler, “ABSTRACT PAINTING: The New Casualists,” The Brooklyn Rail, June 3, 2011.

[36] Robinson, “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism.”

[37] Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, trans. Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono, English ed. edition (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2009), 39–47.

[38] Andrew M. Goldstein, “I Survived the Zombie Formalism Apocalypse: The Hard-Won Lessons of London Dealer Rod Barton,” Artspace, February 12, 2016.

[39] Joseph J. Tanke, “What Is the Aesthetic Regime?,” Parrhesia, no. 12 (2011): 77.

[40] Jason Farago, “Is Painting Dead?,” BBC, February 18, 2015.

[41] Tom Lubbock, “The Triumph of Painting? That’s a Pretty Rich Claim,” The Independent, January 25, 2005.

[42] Andreas Huyssen, “High/Low in an Expanded Field,” Modernism/Modernity 9, no. 3 (September 1, 2002): 363–74.

[43] Farago, “Is Painting Dead?”

[44] Alan Pocaro, “Provisional Painting, Three Hypotheses,” Abstract Critical (blog), February 18, 2014.

[45] Kristen Sharp, “Superflatworlds : A Topography of Takashi Murakami and the Cultures of Superflat Art,” 2006, 178.

[46] Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan, 1 edition (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1995), 2.

[47] Ivy, 7.

[48] Takashi Murakami, “All my works are made up of special effects.,” interview by Philippe Dagen, Book section, 2011, 27.

[49] Favell, Before and after Superflat, 49–51; Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World (New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009), 198.

[50] Brian Ashcraft, “Being an Animator in Japan Is Brutal,” Kotaku, September 3, 2015.

[51] Favell, Before and after Superflat, 54; Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World, 186.

[52] Murakami, “All my works are made up of special effects.,” 27.

[53] Huyssen, “High/Low in an Expanded Field,” 364.

[54] Sharp, “Superflatworlds,” 193.

[55] Neil De Marchi and Hans J. Van Miegroet, “The History of Art Markets,” in Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, ed. Victor A. Ginsburg and David Throsby, vol. 1 (Elsevier, 2006), 70.

[56] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Berg Pub Ltd, 2013), 48.

[57] Adorno, 31.

[58] “Aida Makoto: Monument For Nothing - Press Release Vol. 2” (Mori Art Museum, September 27, 2012).

“On March 11th 2011, a little after 3 pm in the afternoon, Cool Japan was—along with many lives and a large part of the Northern Japan coastline—swept away by a devastating earthquake and tsunami that irrevocably changed Japan once again.”[1] Sociologist Adrian Favell’s words encapsulate a growing sentiment that Cool Japan has overstayed its welcome in a post-global financial crisis, post-tsunami, post-Fukushima world—or, more generally, a post-disaster world, including such tragedies as the Kyoto Animation arson attack in 2019, a deep blow to Japanese animation and fandom. By extension, the art of Cool Japan, Superflat, is also dead; or, as the title of Favell’s book suggests, there is a before and after Superflat was intellectually (if not financially) relevant to Japanese contemporary art. [Figure 1]

The more recent publication of The End of Cool Japan: Ethical, legal, and cultural challenges to Japanese popular culture set the death sentence in stone. [Figure 2] The volume, edited by historian Mark McLelland, includes essays by experts of Japanese pop culture such as Laura Miller, Sharalyn Orbaugh, and Patrick W. Galbraith. On the book’s cover, there is the photograph of a crying Yotsuba figure—the child protagonist of Azuma Kiyohiko’s beloved moé manga Yotsuba&!—dismembered and put away inside a card box along with other toys, her innocence lost. Whether or not the claim that Cool Japan ended with Fukushima holds up, its aftershocks have produced a noticeable shift in the discourse of Superflat artists. As is widely known, the term “super flat” was engineered by visual artist, theorist, and art impresario Murakami Takashi to brand a movement of Japanese postmodern art inspired by the global dissemination of anime, manga, videogames, and the kawaii. According to Favell, the art world's love affair with artists like Murakami, Nara Yoshitomo, or Mori Mariko, was fueled by the rise of Cool Japan’s soft power in the 1990s and 2000s,  creating a favorable zeitgeist that drew to close by the late 2000s, as the Western gaze moved to “new” oriental locations, like China or India.[2] After 2011, Superflat’s “naïve celebrations of bizarre Japanese pop culture or futuristic Neo Tokyo were going to look tasteless”[3]; Cool Japan was but a walking corpse, feeding off the eye candy that kept Western markets hooked, but devoid of any genuine countercultural pull.

As Superflat lost steam, however, new rhetorics emerged around a concept of “rebirth.” The rebirth of Superflat attests to the artists’ struggle to survive in a world that has changed significantly over the last two decades. This shift is also consistent with the attempted revitalization of Superflat artists’ careers: Murakami’s “reluctant homecoming”[4] for a show at the Mori Art Museum, after 14 years away from Japanese museums; Chiho Aoshima’s first solo exhibition in Japan; Mariko Mori’s first major museum shows in New York and London in over a decade (2013). Even if their styles have not changed significantly, the events of 2011 have triggered some soul‑searching in their private lives and art alike—or, at least, the artists are reacting to the expectations that they should have. Murakami, Nara, Mori and other key Superflat artists like Mr., Takano Aya, and Aoshima Chiho, have laced their discourse with themes of hope, rebirth and higher spirituality. They are supposedly more down‑to‑earth, more grounded. For instance, in an interview titled “Yoshitomo Nara Seeks Lasting Art After Japan’s Tsunami,” Nara claims that “I have become more serious than before.”[5] In Stars (2015), a solo show at Pace Gallery in Hong Kong, Nara engages with the ambiguous “notion of the star as both a symbol of hope as well as foreboding.”[6] [Figure 3] The press release states that Nara’s newfound interest in painting over stitched burlap and jute mounted on wood “distinguishes itself from the layering of diaphanous and airy pigments that characterize much of his work, yet finds precedent in his earlier billboard paintings.”[7] The phrasing hints at Nara’s return to a rawer expression, to his earnest early carrier as a cult artist, before stardom transformed him into a businessman and cultural icon.

The blurb from Mori’s exhibition Rebirth (2013), at the Japan Society in New York is titled “A Star Is Reborn,” a pun on Mori’s iconic photograph A Star is Born. An interview conducted by critic Michael Miller headlights that “Mariko Mori Comes Back Down to Earth,”[8] while the curator Tezuka Miwako suggests that “Rebirth reflects Mori’s shift away from a preoccupation with Japanese pop culture and consumerism toward the creation of contemplative and participatory spaces, and a vision of art and technology as essential parts of the broader ecology.”[9] Indeed, Rebirth and other exhibitions like Cyclicscape (2015) convey an eco-friendly shift towards Zen circles and gaianistic new religions, more than anime and cyber-geishas. [Figure 4 & 5] Nevertheless, this updated neo-Y2K aesthetic is rather cute and rendered in smooth gradients and flowing curves, not a sharp edge in sight, hinting that Mori has not shifted away from her usual concern with the Japanese commodity form, as much as she changed her focus to the exploration of minimalist “blobject aesthetics,”[10] equally in vogue in our global consumer markets.

In turn, Takano Aya asserts that she now drinks less, wakes up early, does yoga, converted to vegetarianism, meditates, and no longer reads science fiction, preferring to delve in real science.[11] A review of her show Heaven is Inside of You (2012) accordingly states that “the Japan tsunami of 2011 triggered a philosophical tsunami within Aya Takano,”[12] establishing a direct link between the post-disaster zeitgeist and Takano’s personal changes. [Figure 6] Still, Takano’s latest show at Galerie Perrotin in Paris, The Jelly Civilization Chronicle (2017), moves little away from her girly science fantasy scenarios. The press release states that “Preferring oil paint, which is more natural, to acrylic paint, for example, Aya Takano seems to pursue a new artistic quest … influenced by a unique interest in science and guided by an absolute respect for nature and human life.”[13] [Figure 7] The claim that oils are “more natural” is debatable: while acrylic paint is indeed a petroleum-derived polymer, oil paint still requires the use of paint thinners like turpentine or mineral spirits, which are just as threatening to the environment.[14] But again, the blurb reinforces Takano’s rebirth as someone who is more sustainable as a human being and an artist.

About Aoshima Chiho’s Takaamanohara, the centerpiece of her traveling exhibition Rebirth of the World (2016), [Video 1] a blurb declares that “following natural disasters such as a tsunami and volcanic eruption, the viewer witnesses the return of life and exuberant growth”[15] depicted on a quasi-mythical scale. Made in collaboration with New Zealander animator Bruce Ferguson, Takaamanohara—a Buddhist concept signifying “the plain of high heaven” where the gods reside—reimagines the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in a 10‑meter‑long, 2,5-meter‑high projection of a looped 7-minute animation. [Figure 8] The narrative, complex and detail-packed, “demands that you spend the same time you would on a feature film to feel you have seen it once.”[16] While critics praised Takaamanohara for “having reached a level of perfection beyond any of the artist’s past work,[17] the piece is a parade of Aoshima’s trademark tropes, observed on similar terms in previous works: the playful back‑and‑forth between recognizable Eastern and Western conventions and spirituality, Japanese emakimono[18] scrolls and intricate Boschian hellscapes; her bright Adobe Illustrator graphics used to create otherworldly gardens of biotechnical delights, reminiscent of electronic media and mass-produced commercial forms like billboards and vector motion graphics. If anything, by addressing the idea of rebirth in Buddhist spirituality and referencing a recent tragedy, instead of the older WWII trauma cited in Murakami’s Superflat (2000) and Little Boy (2005) manifestos, Aoshima imbues Takaamanohara with a gravitas adjusted to a new post-2011 sensibility.

Murakami, of course, is no exception to the Superflat discourse of rebirth. Interviewed about his New York show In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow (2014), Murakami explains that the events of 2011 “definitely shifted, on a fundamental level, my position as an artist.”[19] The show moves away from Murakami’s pop culture-inspired work, focusing on the role of religion in post-disaster scenarios.[20] [Figure 9] Murakami himself claims to have had an epiphany of sorts, as he stopped worrying about the competitive contemporary art market.[21] “It feels a little bit more pure,”[22] he says. In the recent retrospective exhibition, Murakami by Murakami (2017) at Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley Museet, the museum’s main hall is dedicated to Murakami’s new works featuring Buddhist and Zen motifs like Arhats (Buddhist saints), Daruma, and ensō circles.[23] In discourse, these works are framed as a direct response in the aftermaths of Japan’s 2011 crisis. The curator, Therese Möllenhoff, remarks about the 30-metre-long painting 727 - 272: <Emergence of God at the Reversal of Fate> (2006-2009) that “this richly detailed painting appears to be almost a mini-retrospective of Murakami’s artistic development, ranging from neo-pop, Superflat and manga-inspired characters to his recently renewed interest in traditional Japanese artistic models and Buddhist motifs.”[24] [Figure 10] Möllenhoff’s choice of words corroborates a Superflat teleology in which otaku pop culture and consumerism are shed like a skin, and artists return to purer, rawer, more spiritual expressions, symbolized by a renewed interest in Japanese tradition and the environment.

Many critics and audiences do not buy into this Superflat Renaissance. While Murakami’s In the Land of the Dead was generally well-received as “a welcome return to a more disturbing style,”[25] critics pointed out that “Murakami’s working some new angles, but he’s still up to his old tricks.”[26] And that, despite Murakami’s spiritual aspirations, “money—and the grandiose art it can buy—seems to be the only religion that matters here.”[27] Although in a gentler tone, Mori’s Rebirth was also mocked for its naivety. “Mori's work is just too precious, too pretty, too orderly, too damned nice,”[28] one critic teases. Unless you are into New Age and ecovillages, “Mori and her work may annoy you… Consider yourself warned." Jabs at the broader movement often accompany compliments about the works of Superflat artists, as when one critic praises Takaamanohara for transcending “boring”[29] Japanese neo-pop.

In this context, the Superflat Renaissance comes across as an expression of Jungian enantiodromia, the principle according to which the superabundance of any psychic force inevitably changes into its shadow opposite. The Superflat artists’ discourse of rebirth attempts to compensate for the zombification of a now “morally disgusting” movement—as philosopher Aurel Kolnai explains, “By ‘moral’ here we understand not ‘ethical’ in a strict and narrow sense, but rather: mental or spiritual, albeit more or less with reference to ethical matters, in contrast to physical.”[30] For instance, while political and socially engaged art is trending in artworld events like the dOCUMENTA and the Venice and Whitney Biennales, Superflat is easily perceived to feed off the same corrupt cultural and economic system responsible for tragedies like the Lehman Brothers collapse, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the presidential election of Donald Trump. To be sure, the art market still loves Murakami and Nara; indeed, their total auction sales after 2008 have exceeded the pre-financial crisis numbers, and Murakami is increasingly popular among Asian collectors.[31] But for most critics, Superflat seems to evoke what Kolnai calls a “disgust by satiety,” i.e., the aversion derived from having had enough of something.[32] This disgust by excess connects the zombification of Superflat to another abject legacy: Greenbergianism, and the birth of Zombie Formalism.

According to Florence Rubenfeld, “Clembashing” (i.e., the bashing of Clement Greenberg) is a phenomenon that “by the late 1970s… had become the art world’s favorite indoor sport.”[33] Flatness in painting went from mourning the impossibility of representation to “constantly risk inconsequence or collapse”[34] in the form of Superflat’s brandification of art (e.g., a Superflat monogram on a Louis Vuitton bag) or the shabby chic look of Provisional Painting and The New Casualists—one could say, first as tragedy, then as farce. Likewise, the trend of provisional painting might be considered “cute” in defying the aesthetic grandeur traditionally expected from artworks. According to critic Sharon L. Butler, “There is a studied, passive-aggressive incompleteness to much of the most interesting abstract work that painters are making today,” reflected in “a broader concern with multiple forms of imperfection: not merely what is unfinished but also the off-kilter, the overtly offhand, the not-quite-right.”[35]A few examples of American New Casualists are Lauren Luloff, Cordy Ryman, Amy Feldman, [Figure 11] and Joe Bradley, but it is a widespread tendency, with European artists such as Julia Haller and David Ostrowski [Figure 12] as two, among many, practitioners. Ironically, while Greenberg rejected art’s connection to kitsch and consumer culture, flatness is now faulted for its kitschiness. Walter Robinson, who coined the term “Zombie Formalism,” tells us:

Drawing from Japanese philosopher Azuma Hiroki, “flatness” seems to have become a moé element for the Western art world: like the databased parts of cute anime and manga characters, flatness has a consumption-triggering effect on contemporary art audiences.[37] According to some critics, the Zombie Formalism bubble has already burst,[38] but the notion nevertheless resonates with deep-seated fears that art has been “led into a dead-end where its options are to satirize the arts of the past or to aestheticize the material of everyday life.”[39] This zombification is particularly interesting in relation to painting, which among the arts is the one that has most often died and been brought back to life. Painting has a long list of premature burials, starting as early as 1839 when Paul Delaroche first laid eyes on a daguerreotype and stated that “from today, painting is dead.”[40] For many critics, painting keeps coming back from the dead, not so much as a Fenix but as a walking corpse. As Tom Lubbock wrote over a decade ago, in response to Saatchi’s exhibition The Triumph of Painting (2005):

While Zombie Formalism is often presented as a rift between abstraction and figurativism, the issue of zombification pertains more thoroughly to what postmodern art and literature critic Andreas Huyssen calls the Great Divide between high art and the market: “a powerful imaginary insisting on the divide while time and time again violating that categorical separation in practice.”[42] Writer Jason Farago notes that even extensive queries into the status of contemporary painting often leave out the taboo of painting’s promiscuous relation to the art market: according to him, “the big question surrounding the rude health of the medium.”[43] Thus, despite their apparent differences—Superflat tends towards maximalist, figurative, and minutely planned art, while Provisionalism (or Casualism) looks minimalist, abstract, and improvised—Superflat and Provisionalism are two poles in the scale of zombified art, indexing the anxiety that painting, in particular, has become a product of the art world’s lingo and discourses. One whose works, as one critic harshly puts it, “are simply the literary equivalents of making a five-star meal out of leftover McDonalds.”[44]

Murakami’s manifestos in the form of a trilogy of books and exhibitions, including Superflat (2000) and Little Boy (2005), occupying enormous buildings at the heart of the art world in Los Angeles and New York (the MOCA Gallery at the Pacific Design Center and the Japanese Society in Manhattan, respectively), have done little to quell these fears, elevating “trashy” otaku culture to the level of “high art.” [Figure 13 & 14] Again, what is at stake is disgust by satiety: Superflat spectacularizes the modernist appreciation for medium specificity and two-dimensionality until it is just too much. And because Superflat simultaneously “reinforces the Western construction of Japan as a culture of surfaceness,”[45] the notion of zombification itself becomes a racialized marker of Japaneseness. As anthropologist Marilyn Ivy points out, despite being a technological powerhouse, the West still perceives Japan as culturally nonmodern,[46] a “colonized copy” by “adept mimics… lacking originality.”[47] Murakami consciously steps into this stereotype, claiming such things as that “all my works are made up of special effects”[48] or talking with honesty about the acrobatics of profit and celebrity he has had to perform in both the Western and Japanese art worlds.[49]

In this context, Superflat’s relentless obsession with the seemingly anachronistic medium of painting, despite the movement's close association with the Internet-driven, multimedia-sensitive, post-human-friendly subculture of otaku, becomes a provocation. Superflat deliberately values the skills unacknowledged by the dominant modernist rhetoric, mostly for their association with mass cultural zombification (i.e., its brainlessness and automaticness): copying, illustrating, decorating, and so on. Indeed, compared to Andy Warhol and his Factory studio, Murakami’s practices have more in common with a Japanese animation company, “a particularly harsh industry, even by Japanese standards,”[50] than the bohemian lifestyle of Warhol superstars.[51] Murakami’s Instagram account often shares photographs of assistants rendering his creations into dozens of canvases, or erasing silkscreen marks for an extra smooth surface. [Figure 15] Murakami’s protégée Mr. also owns an Instagram account where he can be seen replicating computer illustrations like paint‑by‑numbers. [Figure 16a, b] In Murakami’s comments section, it is not uncommon for netizens to leave critical messages, like “art of who?” and “wonder how much of your art is even yours anymore,” while others rush to his defense. Thus, Murakami’s “quest to imbue works with a true soul”[52] through the aura of his author-name—which is also a brand, encapsulated in the ubiquitous quality stamp © MURAKAMI—is, in and of itself, an affirmation of “the modernity of the geographically ‘non-modern.’”[53] That is, by putting the same care into producing a painting, a print, or a stationary item for sale in the corrupt netherworld of the museum shop, Murakami’s perceptualizes his contention that the distinction between “high art” and mass entertainment does not operate in Japan as it does in the West.[54] [Figure 17]

The cuteness of Superflat is a constant reminder of its entanglement with the commercial exploitation of merchandisable characters, and thus resists any attempts at spiritual “rebirth” despite what artists claim. Moreover, Superflat’s cuteness strikes a chord with the West’s art-historical inseparableness from the processes of commodification and cutification. After all, the rise of European easel painting in the Early Modern period steered art away from large-scale palaces and churches, making painting portable and “cuter” to fit the homes of the rising commercial bourgeoisie, sometimes as a cheaper alternative to wall tapestries.[55] Literary critic Sianne Nagi argues that such diminutiveness cast a long shadow over art’s political agency, recalling Theodor Adorno’s words on the taming of the avant-garde’s “autarchic radicalism”[56] into the insular rhetoric of high modernism. For, as Adorno put it, “Absolute color compositions verge on wallpaper patterns. Now that American hotels are decorated with abstract paintings… and aesthetic radicalism has shown itself to be socially affordable, radicalism itself must pay the price that it is no longer radical.”[57] [Figure 18] It is not hard to imagine such jabs about contemporary painting’s promiscuity with wallpaper aesthetics and textile design directed at Murakami’s laughing flowers. [Figure 19] Or Nara’s children, Mori’s blobjects, and Takano and Aoshima’s teenyboppers in pretty fantasy settings.  Or even Aida’s epic Jumble of One Hundred Flowers (2012), [Figure 20a, b] a painting over 17-meters-long where dozens of laughing girls disintegrate into confetti over an endless frieze of colorful pixels—“virtually bear[ing] down like characters in a zombie game,”[58] encapsulating the threat that Japanese cuteness represents the ultimate form of zombification for art in general, and painting in particular.

See in CUTENCYCLOPEDIA – Gakkōgurashi! & Metamorphosis.

See in PORTFOLIO – Magical Transformation.

REFERENCES in Zombieflat.