Tam Ochiai

[imomus]

When I made a record with Emi Necozawa back in 2001, I chose the name Mashroom Haircat for the project. Later we shortened the group name to Mashcat and used 'Mashroom Haircat' as the title of our mini-album on Japanese label Quattro. The name was perfect, for several reasons. Firstly, I'd always found cute the Japanese tendency to mix up Us and As, making 'my tummy' the much sweeter 'my tammy'. Secondly, Emi had been famous in the 90s for her hair, a big frizzy afro, but had since got it 'cat'. The lead track for the mini-album was therefore an electro-baroque rocker called 'I Cat My Hair'. Thirdly, the neko part of Necozawa means 'cat' in Japanese, and Emi is cat-crazy. And finally, because I wanted to make a tribute to one of my favourite painters, Tam Ochiai.



When I started visiting New York regularly in the late 90s, Tam's cramped apartment on Suffolk Street (he'd once shared the place with Takako Minekawa) was one of the places I felt most at home. I remember doing some magazine interview there with Tam and his friend Elizabeth Peyton. Tam showed often at Team Gallery up on West 26th Street, and it was there, sometime in 2000, that I must've seen paintings of his with titles like Simone, can you cat my hair?: blue cafe and Simon's Confession and Sir Edmund's mass: she can't cat hair: u.f.o no school today and marcel: do you need a hair cat:tranceparent cat (james joyce). I was a big fan of Takako Minekawa at the time, and it was easy to look at the delicately quirky girls in these paintings with one of Takako's childish, experimental songs playing in your head... 'Fantastic Cat', perhaps.



Tam, a shy, slim, attractively feline man one pictures dressed permanently in Agnes B, adores women. You almost feel he wants to be the frail girls he paints. "Clearly obsessed by fashion, filmmaking (particularly the French New Wave of the 60s) and music," says his gallery blurb, Tam's "fascination is curiously guileless... Inside all the flourishes that comprise pop culture at its most baroque, Ochiai taps into a minimal softness that invests his work with a strangely beautiful aura. The over 100 small white paintings on view at the Team Gallery are like fragile, intimate diaries of his obsessions featuring a roster of waiflike creatures..."

In its tenderness, its lightness and femininity, its complete lack of conflict and cynicism, Tam's work is also, it seems to me, terribly Japanese, or rather a perfect summation of a certain 90s Tokyo girl culture; he seems to share the taste of those tender-minded girls who read Olive, shopped in Daikanyama and hung Godard posters on their walls. So I was a bit shocked to read the following terribly wrongheaded comment in a Miami Herald review of a Japanese painting show including some of Tam's canvasses:

"Tam Ochai's wispy painted portraits of anemic girls in vintage fashions, their bodies and hairdos always threatening to dissolve into a glib knock-off of American Abstract Expressionism, seem to critique a culture in which so many Japanese women remain ornamental second-class citizens, more often protected than empowered."



There's just so much wrong with that, but it's also terribly revealing of the differences between the US and Japan. Firstly, and factually, the critic spells Tam's name wrong. Secondly, American AbEx is a terribly inappropriate comparison for Tam's work. It really plays no part. If it did, Tam would undoubtedly be a lot more hammy and macho than he is (think De Kooning's 'Woman' series). Next, Tam is absolutely not critiquing "a culture in which so many Japanese women remain ornamental second-class citizens, more often protected than empowered". He just likes wispy girls. He likes their delicacy and cuteness. He wants to be one. He adores them. Finally, to say that Japanese women are 'ornamental second-class citizens' is a gross and stupid racial stereotype.

If we delve into the pre-suppositions behind this judgement, it could even look worse. Japanese artists are making a poor copy of American styles, apparently. Their society is so backward that they must necessarily be critiquing it. Japanese women have no power and exist as mere 'ornaments'. People should be powerful rather than ornamental, in general. (But give me the life of a garden gnome over the life of Condoleezza Rice any day!) To portray a woman, for this critic, is to portray a problem, and to portray a problem is to critique a social malaise.

I was sitting in the refectory of the Future University yesterday, eating lunch, and some girls were combing each other's hair over by the window. It was such a friendly, gentle and tender scene, so girly. It was an image of 'the good'; of tenderness, togetherness, lightness, happiness. I was envious. I'm sure Tam would have been too.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

do you know this page:

http://www2m.biglobe.ne.jp/~maccha/hair/

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Fun! I like the haircat fruit machine.

great hea!

[porandojin.livejournal.com]

casual 1993 extravaganza

[dzima.livejournal.com]

Firstly, thanks for telling us about Ochiai's work as I didn't and will look further about him.

Secondly, the other week I was watching another one of those MTV/VH1/whatevermusicchannel documentaries on the 'Top 50 women in Rock'. They just went on and on about how Tina Turner was a 'dominatrix', how Avril Lavigne would fistfight and the win the fight with the boys, Pink had an 'individual' and 'rebel' boyish style, Demi Moore would direct her directors...

I was just asking myself: what is with this American obsession about women having to be more macho than men? It seems like another one of those 'Universal' values that need to be spread around. Or maybe like: 'We have figured out the universal way of ruling the world, and since men and women are the same, that's the way women should behave if they want to be empowered'.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The sad thing is that the category of 'the feminine' has become taboo in the US. It has simply collapsed into disrepute. That goes for gay life as well as straight; nobody advertises themselves in gay personal ads as a 'sissy man' or a 'girly man' or a 'flouncy queen' or a 'pretty boy', they're all 'macho' or a 'big ole bear'. Is masculinity really so great? Or is it the Microsoft of gender?

[(Anonymous)]

Men with Macs more commonly flash;
The mush in mushroom is mash ...

RW

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, your critque of the Miami Herald's critique seems rather wrong-headed to me. It's something I've seen you do elsewhere, confusing art with artistic intent. I don't care too much about how Ochiai conceives his own art. Half the time, artists don't have a fucking clue what they're doing anyway, or they do only after the fact. Ochiai may well adore wispy women, and may well want to celebrate it in his art. And while I wouldn't want to go as far as the Miami Herald critic, there is nonetheless something deeply ambiguous about Ochiai's representations of women, whether that was an express intent or not. In fact that ambiguity about femininity, with the parallels between femininity and childishness in the drawings (or is childish perception of femininity?), the mysterious rather dark expressions on their faces, all that adds to what makes these pictures interesting.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Art is all about personal response, but I disagree that there's anything 'dark' here. There might be something dark in Yoshitomo Nara, but not in Tam Ochiai. The fact that we want Tam to be 'dark' is interesting, though. It's like we'd be embarrassed, otherwise, by his tweeness, his gentleness.

'Dark' is an adjective we throw at female or feminine artists when we feel embarrassed about saying they're simply feminine. That's because 'dark' is a hard, tough, misanthropic, asocial sort of value, and in the West we like those. Dark is masculine, but to show we're not sexist we let the girls be masculine too.

[(Anonymous)]

What's Emi-chan up to lately?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

She was living in Paris for a year or so, but I think she's back in Tokyo now. She's always playing low-key live shows round town. I'm not sure if she has a record contract these days.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't find 'dark' a signifier of masculinity in the least bit - you're just shoehorning that into a preconceived argument. 'Dark' representations of feminine tragedy have been a staple since the Greeks for chrissakes.

'Dark' is interesting only so much as ambiguity, layers of meaning and contrasts are interesting, and it's pretty hard to make good art without those. Shakespearian comedies need their sad songs, and the tragedies need their comic interludes. Post-Warhol, David Lynch etc., tweenness tends to carry a certain darkness about it anyway. For ideological reasons, you're trying to make Ochiai's art blander than it is. I'm not saying it's super dark, I'm saying there are these ambiguities in there, there is tweenness and there's a sort of distancing from the tweenness as well and the work operates somewhere in the middle.

アロハ!

[(Anonymous)]

Another great journal entry モーマス先生! Thank you for your observations!

- プチ

[niemandsrose.livejournal.com]

It's okay, it happens all the time. I once read a student paper referring to butoh, in passing, as another one of the "ancient art forms of Japan". You know, it's from Japan. Ergo it must be ancient. Fuckwit.

Anyway, my point is that most Americans can't tell ancient from modern, can't tell Japanese from Chinese (witness the furore over "Memoirs of a Geisha" (http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/waiwai/face/index.html), a generic orientalist fantasy if I ever saw one), and can't tell feminism from p.c.

'Twas ever thus.

And now I feel reborn

[instant-c.livejournal.com]

I never could get ahold of the mashcat album. I tried tokyo recohan, amoeba, othermusic,..... no luck. Is there anywhere I can still find this album? It's been on my active hunting list since it was released, I can tell you it ain't easy to find.

[silentalarm.livejournal.com]

those are really pretty artwork.. thanks for sharing them.

I like to take them home it's understood

[(Anonymous)]

erik
rotterdam
the netherlands

[(Anonymous)]

I was sitting in the refectory of the Future University yesterday, eating lunch, and some girls were combing each other's hair over by the window. It was such a friendly, gentle and tender scene, so girly. It was an image of 'the good'; of tenderness, togetherness, lightness, happiness. I was envious. I'm sure Tam would have been too.

I just love girlishness. In girls and boys.

Neat paintings, by the way.

Young Person's Sexual Song-With-Animal-Legs

[(Anonymous)]

"Recently Japan has become famous for bukkake.. Panda said she'd f*ck up any guy who did that to her.." Quite.

http://www.harmful.org/homedespot/newtdr/NEWtdrARCHIVE/6diary/SEXBOOK/1.html

UrbanOspreys.Org.Uk

Re: Young Person's Sexual Song-With-Animal-Legs

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, you're quoting out of context there. Behind your two dots there's a change of subject. In fact, Panda doesn't want to have her navel twirled.

Re: Young Person's Sexual Song-With-Animal-Legs

[dzima.livejournal.com]

I laughed when the guy I was poking fun at one of the girls for having a small bottom. Is this a universal value that says we are all to like women with big derrieres and breasts? Are womanly shapes better than girly shapes? Whatever is big now will be big and also floppy later.
(By the way, I don't know where he took the 'with Animal legs' part of the title from. The name of the book is 'Young person's sexual song' dake.)

[slowbicycle.livejournal.com]

i enjoy these images.

[kementari2.livejournal.com]

I can't say much more than you just did, but thank you for that well-put response.

boo

[(Anonymous)]

Im a deadjournal user but i was browsing the live journal files.............................congrats on having such a "blazin" lifestyle............lucky fool... :)

incorporating an rss feed into your blog

[(Anonymous)]

dear momus, i love your blog but can't keep up with it since i don't have your rss feed, or indeed if you even have one, but if you don't will you please consider incorporating one for the sake of people like me, thanks, marc t.