About Missin Pipo-Kun

Mission Pipo-Kun

Mixed Media

(Acrylic, Oil Pastel, Found Materials and Epoxy on OSB)81 × 122 cm – 61 × 81 cm

2026

The urban waste I carefully collected and accumulated during my travels in Japan forms both the physical and conceptual ground of this work. Ranging from chip and chocolate wrappers to beer, milk, and ice cream containers, from coins and stickers to photographs I took in photo booths while holding some of these products and money in my hands, these materials create a dense, almost chaotic surface in which layers of objects overlap beneath epoxy. On this surface, the paintings follow the three-part story of three fugitives kidnapping Pipo-kun, the mascot of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department: in the first scene, the characters are secretly attempting to open a door; in the second, they are carefully carrying Pipo-kun away between them; and in the third, they are fleeing the scene in a stolen police car. Pipo-kun resembles less a kidnapped person or police officer than a work of art secretly removed from a museum, retaining the smile and unchanging pose on his face. This deliberately blurs the relationship between crime, value, and the object. Yet it is the consumer objects surrounding these three scenes, almost rendering them invisible, that ultimately establish the true context of the story.

For years, I have tried to limit my own consumption habits, to avoid buying anything unnecessary, and to stay away from packaged products as much as possible. During my solo trip to Japan, however, I gave myself permission to do the exact opposite: to shop, eat, and consume as my inner child desired. Tokyo's density, its visual and sensory excess, and the world it constructs through stores that constantly generate new desires, packaging, characters, and small objects of consumption quickly transformed this decision into an experience that was both liberating and unsettling. For this reason, the materials filling the backgrounds of the paintings are not merely the discarded remains of products consumed during the trip; they also function as a record of the pleasure, guilt, bewilderment, and sensory overload that this consumption produced in me. The dense surface, which makes it difficult to focus on the paintings themselves, emerges as a conscious response to the increasing difficulty of looking and choosing within consumer culture. Everything is visible at once, everything demands attention, and every object carries the potential to become a new desire.

In this sense, Tokyo became, for me, not simply a city but an intensely concentrated experience of how late capitalism and consumer culture surround everyday life. The escape narrative at the center of the work therefore carries less a personal story of crime than a tension between desire and control, consumption and guilt, freedom and self-discipline. The fact that Pipo-kun is kidnapped like a work of art, while consumer objects surround the artwork, questions how we determine what is valuable and which objects become desirable, worth preserving, or associated with guilt. Through this process, I found myself confronting, simultaneously, the forms of consumption I had spent years trying to avoid, the guilt I associated with them, and the more spiritual approach to life that I carry alongside these concerns. For this reason, the series is not simply a critique of consumerism or late-stage capitalism; it is also a portrait of the contradiction experienced by someone who tries to remain outside this system, only to suddenly find themselves at its very center. Every piece of packaging I collected is, on the one hand, the worthless waste left behind by a consumed product, while on the other, it becomes a memory of a particular moment, desire, and experience. In this way, the absurd story unfolding between the kidnapped Pipo-kun, the fugitives, and the police car ultimately becomes an allegory of my own relationship with consumption: standing at the very center of what I have been trying to escape, struggling even to look at it, caught somewhere between guilt and fascination.

About Pipo-Kun

Pipo-kun's presence in my work emerges not only as a visual reference specific to Tokyo, but also as an extension of my interest in the way public and social communication in Japan is constructed through cuteness. Created on April 17, 1987 as the symbolic mascot of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, Pipo-kun was designed to position the police as a more approachable, familiar, and trustworthy institution for the public. His name derives from the words people and police; his large ears symbolize listening to the voices of the public, his eyes represent seeing every corner of society, and the antenna on his head symbolizes the ability to quickly perceive social movements and changes. The fact that his design combines cute characteristics drawn from various animals is also part of an approach that presents authority not directly, but through a cute, accessible, and almost harmless figure. This approach extends beyond Pipo-kun itself and finds a broader counterpart in Japan's yuru-kyara culture, in which local governments and public institutions frequently use characters to make official communication feel more intimate and inviting. I find this method particularly interesting because in my own artistic practice, I also tend to approach heavy, disturbing, or contradictory subjects through humor, cuteness, absurdity, and playful imagery rather than addressing them through a direct and didactic language. The way Pipo-kun represents an institution associated with authority and control, such as the police, through a smiling and endearing body feels, in this sense, like a public-space counterpart to my own visual language.

What interests me here is not kawaii aesthetics itself, but what cuteness makes possible as a form of communication, and what it can simultaneously render invisible. A serious issue can become more easily acceptable through the face of a cute character; disturbing content can approach the viewer in a softer way through humor and playfulness.

A similar tension exists in my own work: I approach heavy subjects such as consumption, guilt, impulses, the pressure of time, and ecological anxiety through romanticized, absurd, or almost childlike imagery. For this reason, transforming Pipo-kun from a kidnapped police mascot into something resembling a work of art stolen from a museum is, for me, not merely a fictional narrative, but also an act of identification with and reinterpretation of this form of visual communication. Pipo-kun becomes both an object detached from the authority he represents and a mirror of my own artistic practice: a figure that continues to smile within a serious world, bringing together concepts that might otherwise seem distant from one another—threat, desire, guilt, and consumption—on the same deceptively cute surface.