In the works of Japanese contemporary artist Mr., a former protégé of fellow ‘Superflat’ artist Takashi Murakami, cheery adolescents with huge round eyes and doll-like heads play in a fairy-tail world. Although seemingly carefree, the artist’s signature exaggerated manga-style pieces act as a therapeutic exercise for the artist, as he views creating as an act of escapism from his personal troubles. Drawing both from the Japanese concept of kawaii, meaning ‘cuteness’, and lolicom (a shortened version of the English term ‘Lolita Complex’), his ambiguous compositions offer an intriguing blend of the comforting and the perverse. In Swing, a small school child swings forth into the centre of the work, her watery doe-eyes wide and her mouth joyfully beaming. Delicately rendered in watercolour and pencil on paper, Mr. transforms the visual language of otaku in Swing to that of fine art, as he employs the distinctive features of anime to examine the boundaries between high and low forms of contemporary expression.

Mr. has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions around the world. In the past two years, this has included at Galerie Perrotin’s locations in Seoul, Paris and Hong Kong, as well as a solo exhibition at Musée Guimet in Paris (2019). His work can be found in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Daegu Art Museum, South Korea, among others.