How Japan's "most famous" artist, and others, are subverting the country's famous cute "kawaii" aesthetic to question the world we live in. More than a millennium ago, the Japanese empress Fujiwara no Teishi gifted one of her court ladies, Sei Shōnagon, a bundle of fine paper. Sei, who was from a literary family, used the pages to jot down observations from her daily life in a collection now known as The Pillow Book (1002).
In one section, Sei wrote a list of "adorable" or "utsukushi" things, from "hopping" baby sparrows to a child "clinging to someone who has picked him up" to simply "anything small". While today, the book is seen as a window into Japanese nobility during the Heian Period (AD794-1185), Sei's idea of what is utsukushi still resonates with people today and is seen as one of the earliest examples of Japanese "kawaii" culture, though the term "kawaii" which translates to "cuteness" was not a part of the country's lexicon at the time. "All of the items on the list are things that we would find cute today, which is remarkable because society was really different 1,000 years ago in Japan," says Tokyo-based professor Joshua Paul Dale, who specialises in cute studies at Chuo University.
"It ends up being a significantly complete documentation of a cute aesthetic that existed even before the word cute did." Kawaii, as we know it today, began in Japan around the 1970s and has since become a world-renowned phenomenon, recognised globally for its colourful, childlike a.