JAPONISM 2.0: MEET THE ARTISTS KEEPING JAPAN RISING IN 2013
In the 19th century the French coined the term Japonism to describe the growing influence of Japanese art, culture and aesthetics on their European counterparts.
More than 140 years later a new wave of Japonism has emerged in modern music. This time however the influences are bi-directional: Japanese artists are taking aesthetic influences from the West, reshaping them into something distinctively Japanese and sending them back to the West in what can be thought of as an aesthetic feedback loop.
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My lifelong fascination with Japan started as a child thanks to French TV programming, itself a strange, modern mutation of the idea of Japonism. For more than a decade Japanese culture and aesthetics were subtly piped into our unconscious via anime packaged as afternoon children TV. It turned a large section of my generation into inadvertent, lifelong Japanophiles.
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