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Land of the Rising Graffiti Artist: New Book Documents Japan’s Exploding Street Art Scene through Images and Interviews
August 12, 2008
Contact: Joel Samberg
Telephone: 1.973.857.8070
New York, NY, August 12, 2008 — Mark Batty Publisher, a leader in distinctive books covering the graphic and communication arts, has released the first book to take readers on such a comprehensive and intimate tour of Japan’s burgeoning graffiti movement. Written and photographed by Remo Camerota, “Graffiti Japan” provides a revealing Japanese perspective on a conventionally Western tradition.
Japan has long been a breeding ground for innovative angles and perceptions on Western traditions, such as movies and baseball. The fanatical acceptance of streetscape graffiti in Japan has torn the art form away from its Western roots and has given it a national identity of its own. “Graffiti Japan” documents that evolution with a multitude of photographs, artist interviews and author commentary.
The photographs in “Graffiti Japan” feature a wide range of graffiti styles, settings and subject matter, including sprawling commissioned murals and illegal art in hidden spots that feature anime and manga characters, kanji and much more.
According to Camerota, the seeds for the book were sewn during his first trip to Japan to meet the graffiti artist SUIKO, who had him “crawling around in places no one would ever think to go looking for graffiti.”
Subsequent interviews with SUIKO and others who have given themselves such names as TENGA, QP, KRESS, BELX2, FATE and EMAR reveal how these artists define their work as distinctively Japanese, musing on everything from foreign influences, national pride and public perceptions, to replicating the calligraphic intricacies of the Japanese language with spray paint.
