Kazuyoshi Usui: Coloured With Contradiction

Photographer Kazuyoshi Usui’s work combines good and bad taste in Japanese society, often using vivid colour and juxtaposing opposites to reveal essential truths. He talks to Carol Cooper about his love of the tacky as a way of expressing humanity 

Since the ninth century, Japan has been producing art and design of exquisite refinement and sophistication: delicate ukiyo-e woodblock prints; perfectly placed flowers arranged according to the discipline of ikebana; architecture that meditates on the Buddhist philosophy of harmony with nature. This is a country that’s given us – in Hokusai’s Great Wave and other iconic images – a tsunami of subtlety and centuries of good taste. It’s also given us Hello Kitty.

Kitty is part of the national aesthetic of kawaisa, or cuteness, that began in the 80s and has permeated all elements of modern culture, part of what US author and Japanophile Donald Richie dubbed ‘The Kingdom of Kitsch’. Describing Japan in 1992, he wrote: “Bad taste is a constant force to reckon with.”

Yet is bad taste always a bad thing? Tokyo-based photographer Kazuyoshi Usui thinks not. His 2011 exhibition and photobook Showa88 mixes typical tropes of Japanese beauty, such as cherry blossom, with tacky brothel scenes, plastic flowers and a lot of neon pink. He favours a particularly ‘chemical’ type of pink as he feels it looks cheap, but a good kind of cheap.

Usui’s eye for the perfect pink, and a great picture in general, has led to success as a commercial photographer working across fashion, music and advertising. He’s produced print campaigns for big players such as Samsung, Sapporo, Mazda, Epson, Nissan, PlayStation 2 and Nintendo Game Boy, and has twice been awarded Grand Prize (2006, 2011) in the Japan Advertising Photographers’ Association Awards.

He won a Fox Talbot Award from Tokyo Polytechnic University in 1996, the Fuji Photo Salon New Face Prize in 1999 and was featured this year in the British Journal of Photography’s Ones To Watch round-up of international talent.

He’s also exhibited in London and New York as well as Tokyo, where his solo shows, Macaroni Christian (published as a photobook in 2006) and Showa88 received widespread acclaim.

He never intended to go into photography, despite the fact that his father, Taikan Usui, is a successful photographer who takes “famous people’s portraits,” understates Usui. By famous here, we’re not talking celeb snaps, more stunning portraits of near deities – from the Dalai Lama to Nelson Mandela. It was an accidental discovery on his father’s bookshelf that set the young Usui’s destiny in motion. “I was about to graduate from high school. One day, I found the book Man and Woman by Eikoh Hosoe among my father’s books, and I somehow entered a world that I should not have entered.” Renowned photographer Hosoe’s 1960 book explores the rivalry between the sexes via stark nude studies and reminded the young Usui of the avant-garde films he loved. “It was that book that caused my interest in photography.” He went on to study under Hosoe at Tokyo Polytechnic University.

Taking in the trash

Cinema has been a huge influence on his work. His favourite exponent of ‘the tacky’ is filmmaker John Waters. He loves Pink Flamingos (pink again) and claims that “Waters is good at mixing bad taste with good taste”. As a teenager, he adored the underground films of Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger, and his love of Spaghetti Westerns pops up often in conversation. The title of his series Macaroni Christian – a musing on Jesus visiting modern-day Tokyo – references Spaghetti Westerns, which he sees as good examples of fakeness, and he’s a huge fan of their soundtracks. “My inspiration in advertising photography has been Ennio Morricone,” he says, employing a dazzling conflation of disparate artistic disciplines that only the truly creative mind can pull off.  “For me, advertising photography is like a film score. Faced with a story that’s already been written, the composer must enhance the movie. Unlike Mozart or Beethoven, who created music out of nothing, Morricone had to work to the setting and screenplay. His gift is his interpretation and his spirit of experimentation. These characteristics are also vital to advertising photography, where you have a set budget, product and brief to work to.”

Usui says he strives to “get the essence of film into my photography”. He had originally intended Showa88 as a movie titled Bullet Boy, a “cheesy drama” following the final visions of a dying yakuza gangster. But he realised a film would be too ‘finished’, and he wanted something that would be more open to the viewer’s interpretation.

The concept for Showa88 draws on Japan’s second calendar, an imperial year system corresponding to the life of each emperor. The nation is currently in the 26th year of the Heisei period; before that, the Showa period under Emperor Hirohito ran from 1926 to 1989. If it had continued, 2013 would have been Showa 88. Usui’s exhibition and the book came in 2011, so he was imagining a future two years hence.

“With photographs, you can only shoot what’s happening now, but with Showa88 I wanted to shuffle up the past, present and future,” he says. The Showa era was a period of turbulence, but great vibrancy, he feels: “After the war, the country had to be rebuilt. There was high-speed economic growth, it was a really lively period. People lived harder lives, were more energetic. Nowadays, people somehow lack the energy to live life with strength.” He set about looking for that sense of vigour in today’s Japan and found it in rundown areas of Osaka and Kyoto. It’s here, he’s said in the past, that he’s found there is still a sense of survival. While he finds some of Tokyo’s more fashionable parts can be all grey concrete, these troubled areas are “flooded with colour”. 

Temporal mash-ups, shifting interpretations and juxtaposed opposites is where Usui feels the truth lies: “The vulgar and the sacred; the real and the fake; the good taste/bad taste of Japanese culture. Only with contradictions, when fighting against something, is humanity expressed.”