Hyperart: Thomasson

Literary Nonfiction. Art. East Asia Studies. In the 1970s Tokyo, artist Akasegawa Genpei and his friends began noticing what they termed hyperart, aesthetic objects created by removing a structures function, while carefully maintaining the structure itself. They called these objects Thomassons, after an American pinchhitter recruited by a Japanese baseball team, whose bat never connected with a ball. In the 1980s, through submissions from students and readers, Akasegawa collected and printed photos of Thomassons in a column in Super Photo Magazine. He wrote these columns with a warm, goofy humor that seems intended to cast back nihilism, irony, and other common responses to 20th century urbanization. What emerged was a lighthearted, yet profound, picture of how modernization was changing Japans urban landscape, and the culture that underpinned it. These columns, collected into a book, became a cult hit among lateeighties Japanese youth. What they saw in this assemblage of casual photos and humorous descriptions was, as essayist Jordan Sand puts it, a way of regaining some sense of the human imprint on the city in an era when that imprint was being rapidly erased.