"THE Doraemon Exhibition TOKYO 2017" will be held at the Mori Arts Center Gallery in Roppongi Hills from November 1st to January 8th. This exhibition features 28 leading artists and groups in Japan's contemporary art scene, bringing together Doraemon and contemporary art. Through Doraemon, we capture the "now" of contemporary art. Yuji Yamashita, an art historian and professor at Meiji Gakuin University and the exhibition's curator, commented on the exhibition, "Roughly half of the 28 artists and groups are recognized as current leaders in contemporary art, including Takashi Murakami. The remaining half are young artists with great potential. They worked hard to create wonderful works in response to the request to 'make your own Doraemon.'" Among these, five artists from the "Doraemon generation"—Tomomi Kondo, Ai Shinohara, Hideki Yamaguchi, Wataru Ito, Ryuki Yamamoto, and Nozomi Watanabe—had their completed works unveiled ahead of the event.


●Tomomi Kondo/Artist
Kondo, who loves Doraemon so much that she even collects merchandise, created a piece that depicts the mirror world that appears in "Doraemon the Movie: Nobita and the Steel Troops" (released in 1986). She cited Shizuka's words in the film, "Sometimes it's human nature to do things that go against logic," as the highlight of the piece, and delves into the "contradictions of humanity." The upper part of the piece is set in 2045, while the lower part is set in 1985, the year the manga that inspired the film's release began. The piece taps into the nostalgia felt by everyone, both in the mirror world and in reality, and incorporates motifs that came to mind, including her own memories of Doraemon.



●Ai Shinohara / Painter
Shinohara creates unique pictorial worlds using classical oil painting techniques. This time, her artwork is based on the scene from "Doraemon the Movie: Nobita's Great Underworld Adventure" (released in 1984), in which mermaids lure Doraemon and his friends with their song, only to be nearly eaten by a beaked whale. In the original work, the horned whale is trying to confuse Doraemon and his friends, but in this film the shape of the horned whale and mermaid has been slightly changed to soften the image of their adversary. The depiction of the skin and scales, the texture of the mermaid, and the floating sensation of Doraemon and Nobita all create a sense of realism and differences from the original work.



●Hideki Yamaguchi / Ink Painter, Wataru Ito / Paper Artist
Yamaguchi and Ito collaborated to create this piece based on the secret gadgets that appear in the film "Doraemon: Nobita and the Kingdom of Clouds" (released in 1992). Yamaguchi meticulously reproduced the secret gadgets in ink paintings created by Ito and included explanatory text. The mysterious relationship between time and space is revealed through the realistic paper representation of secret gadgets from the future, and the descriptions that make the gadgets seem like something nostalgic.