Hideaki Kawashima Little Boy - Fire

Public Art Fund presents a series of four public art projects as part of Little Boy, a major exhibition hosted by Japan Society Gallery. The exhibition and public installations, all curated by Takashi Murakami (b. 1963, Tokyo, Japan) explore the astoundingly popular phenomenon called otaku, a Japanese youth subculture obsessed with fantastic and apocalyptic science fiction, fantasy, video games, comic books (manga), and film animation (anime), whose visual and musical forms are rapidly becoming globalized. The exhibition features works by leading creators of these popular art forms as well as related paintings, sculpture, and photography by acclaimed contemporary Japanese Neo-Pop artists such as Yoshitomo Nara and Chiho Aoshima. A fully illustrated, bilingual catalogue, copublished with Yale University Press, accompanies the exhibition.

Work by four artists whose artwork is on view inside the Japan Society’s galleries—Chiho Aoshima (b. 1974, Tokyo, Japan), Aya Takano (b. 1976, Saitama, Japan), Hideaki Kawashima (b. 1969, Aichi, Japan), and Noboru Tsubaki (b. 1953, Kyoto, Japan)—is featured on more than a thousand MTA subway placards that appear inside the doorways of subway cars.