Nothing goes together these days like youth entertainment, violence, and sex. It's like a sticky sweet mixed drink, 90% alchohol, tasting of both of adulthood, ectocooler, and mass consumption. And we here in the contemporary age like to be reminded of, and seek out, any trace of inevitable corruption in the children we, as a culture, watch grow up. that's why I love the Superflat movement - I feel like recent generation grew up slowly, holding on to their childhood stories and heroes long after they began realizing that life was tough and sex felt amazing. A lack of spiritual guidance in the age of information didn't help either. We are as simultaneously mixed up and homogenized as Takashi Murakami's tradmark creeps.
That's why I immediately bookmarked French designer X-Gum's website. The same techniques that made Superflat so good at calling out Japanese Americanization and Fetishization can work to reveal a repressed memory in our American history: that night we got really trashed and lost our virginity to pop culture. Nice months later what comes out is a manic young protean god resembling every toy or comic book or video game you ever pulled your mom's skirt to buy you. It's a bizarre and autistic child. It'll get your hands slimy if you touch it, but it's kind of cute, even as throws up neon all over the floor.
There are billions of these bastards, these multicolor goblins. They have no real face to speak of, only ubiquitous cartoon eyes that stare out through a hard plastic glaze. They have no stable shape or name. Some have teeth. Sharp teeth. And they take up a massive amount of space, crowding like those beak-less chickens in KFC poultry farms, leaving the basement of this great American insane asylum strewn with... is that chewed bubblegum and spoiled milk? Gross.
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