JUN INAGAWA
JUN INAGAWA is a 19-year-old young artist (at the time of this solo exhibition).
He moved to San Diego, USA in 2012, where he launched his career as an artist. He then relocated to Los Angeles, where he built his practice around “moe” and street culture. Starting from posts on Instagram, he collaborated in 2018 with brands such as VLONE, AWGE, and DIESEL’s brand campaign “HA(U)TE COUTURE.” He has now returned to Japan, where — while pursuing a career as a manga artist — his work spans across magazines, catalogues, and many other fields.
Magical Girl DESTROYERS (Moe)
We visited “DIESEL ART GALLERY,” where JUN INAGAWA’s first solo exhibition, “Magical Girl DESTROYERS (Moe),” was being held.
This solo exhibition unfolds a story told by ultimate, anarchist magical girls created to fight the government — “Magical Girl Anarchy,” “Magical Girl Destroy,” and “Magical Girl Blue.”
The premise is this: anime, video games, figures, 2D waifus — everything belonging to Japanese subculture and “otaku” culture — has been outlawed by the “2D Prohibition Act.” Otaku, cast out and treated like trash by society with nowhere left to go, mobilize all the knowledge, wisdom, and skills they earned by devoting their youth to otaku pursuits, and rise up to fight to bring otaku culture back to Japan.
The original artworks had already sold out in the first half of the run, with only an edition of 10 print works still available; merchandise sales were also going strong.
Items more oriented toward otaku fans — life-sized standees and dakimakura (body pillows) — were also on sale, though these seemed not to be moving quite as briskly.
When we asked the gallery staff, they told us that JUN INAGAWA’s fans are overwhelmingly male, and that the crowd skews more toward otaku culture than toward the art scene.
The world JUN INAGAWA creates is expanding out from Instagram as its base, steadily winning over the hearts of his fans. His worldview — dismantling accepted conventions and taking on both “otaku culture” and “street culture” as its banner — seems to capture the messages of today’s youth, and left us feeling as if it were being directed straight at us, the viewers.
Photo: Miki Matsushima
