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Pop art emerged as a distinct art form in the 1960s within the context of a wide range of urban subcultures – fashion, film, club culture, and so on – appropriating these forms and sharing common ground while presenting a different way of viewing the world. Pop art is always somewhat intrusive and provocative because it presents 'pop' as a hypothesis, a way of seeing. The idea of 'life as art' has been raised to another level since pop art's emergence. Celebrating the urban and the artificial and approaching mass culture, pop art is reproducible, denies originality and rejects artistic privilege. It identifies with our everyday life in order to spellbind us and, in so doing, draws out a beauty and poetry that is entirely appropriate for our time.

Within Asia, Japan was the first to engage with pop art in the 1960s. Various expressions emerged, often with a graphic or performative element. The so-called 'neo-pop' which arose in Europe and America in the second half of the 1980s customised the 1960s idea of pop art; reflecting the increasing presence of digital media and the internet within society. Neo-pop drastically changed the concept of appropriation and the readymade through the techniques of 'sampling' and 'remixing'. In 1980s Japan, neo-pop began with artists such as Yasumasa Morimura and Yanobe Kenji. Their hybrid images quoted liberally from art and film history, abounding with sci-fi monsters and robots. These artists were no longer following the West, but had their feet firmly planted on their own cultural territory. Closer in spirit to the genres of manga and anime, Mariko Mori and Takashi Murakami emerged in the mid-1990s with their highly manipulated images. Assembling cartoon fragments on a thin flat surface, each carrying equal weight but devoid of content, Murakami's 'superflat' style was an anarchic expression of a post-media world; an ageless, eternal present.

Around the same time, Yoshitomo Nara became known for his drawings of a generic child, at once sensitive and defiantly resisting reality. By remaining in eternal childhood, Nara's work attempts to realise our primitive potentiality. His images, particularly those delicately drawn on scrap-like pieces of paper and sparsely posted on the wall, surpass the symbolism of 'cute' cartoon icons to become deeply emotional subjects. They are anti-figurative, abstract and distorted images not unlike those found in the art of Paul Klee, except that they are not based on human models but abstraction of characters existing in the reality of manga. Japanese pop is often described as sentimental 'wet' pop, and this owes much to Nara. His pop art is representative of Japan, a country lacking experience of such nationhood initiations as revolution or independence, and which enjoys a democracy 'given' under a United States protectorate. Cut off from its pre-Second World War values, it is a nation experiencing a degeneration-of-adulthood culture as well as the contemporaneity of post-historic society. In a country with no hierarchy between high and low culture, pop art merges easily with folk elements and surrealism, providing infinite possibilities of expression ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Summer 2009 issue.