Shintaro Miyake at Tomio Koyama

Shintaro Miyake, 34, is the latest star to pop from the Tomio Koyama Gallery, and he seems ready for the gallery's international push, since he has called himself Shintaro Star in previous performances. Like his stable-mates Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara, Miyake works with cartoonlike characters. But his colored-pencil drawings, obsessively scrawled in a naive style, look more like outsider art than manga.

For his solo debut at Koyama, Miyake chose a summer theme and cast his longtime favorite character, Sweet-san (Ms Sweet), as a bathing beauty. Sweet-san is a cute, gangly, idealized imp, equal parts ingenue, Bond girl from the movies and dress-up Barbie. Her wide lozenge of a head--with Bambi eyes, elfin ears and an open-mouthed grin--balances atop a spindly body with swooping, limp-noodle appendages. Her hair and clothes change constantly. She has blue pigtails and a white bikini one minute, a black bob and schoolgirl one-piece swimsuit the next.

Covering one wall were more than two dozen foot-high drawings mounted on thin, shaped wooden panels. Some have Sweet-san posing in different outfits. The best look like variations on Botticelli's Birth of Venus, but rather than standing naked on a shell, Sweet-san, in a swimsuit, surfs on the backs of jellyfish and giant salamanders.

Spanning the opposite long wall and stretching nearly floor to ceiling was Shimoda, a cartoony colored-pencil-on-paper panorama of the seaside resort town where Miyake spent childhood vacations. Of course, Sweet-san is everywhere: hundreds of her avatars (most about 4 to 6 inches tall, occasionally nearly 2 feet high) climb hills, visit seafood shacks and ride on killer whales. The figures cover the beach, their variously colored hair, bikinis and accessories overlapping like hundreds of rainbow fish scales. The stylized landscape crammed with figures is like a bespoke Buddhist mandala. But the "goddess" with the archaic smile and multiple forms is not Kannon in the Pure Land, it's Sweet-san playing in Miyake's summer paradise.

Sweet-san isn't the only one having fashion fun. Miyake's key gimmick is that he draws in the gallery during his shows while wearing homemade costumes. As in previous exhibitions elsewhere, he made an outfit that fit the theme: he appeared as Fluffy, in skyblue coveralls printed with white clouds. Fluffy's oversized head, with cloud-printed mesh fabric concealing Miyake's face, resembled Sweet-san's except for absurdly long floppy ears, held up slightly by beach-ball-size, round white helium balloons attached to the ends.

Throughout the exhibition, Fluffy drew his usual odalisque on 14-foot-long sheets of paper attached to one wall. By the close, he had finished three new pieces. The number of assorted smaller Sweet-san drawings on the remaining wall also increased over the course of the show, but these were created outside the gallery.

Miyake's exhibitions usually combine street theater and nonstop production. He first creates a background scenario to set the theme (here, Shimoda; in the past, Star Wars or the 19th-century arrival of Commodore Perry in Japan). Then he fuses himself with the narrative by making new drawings, dressed in character. It's personalized, one-man epic performance art with a paper trail.

--John McGee

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