The Brooklyn Rail

The House of Pikachu: Art, Anime, and Pop Culture, presented by the Asia Society Texas, explores the manifold associations of not only Pikachu but the scope of anime at large. Taking a sweeping view of its influence, most of the artists assembled by Owen Duffy, Nancy C. Allen Curator and Director of Exhibitions, like him grew up in a world in thrall with this aesthetic and its evolution, experiencing the aftereffects of its dispersal. Animation and comics—anime and manga—reside in the realm of the infinite; as pure visuals, they can propel their narratives regardless of their language of origin, yielding meaning where other modes of expression fail. Anime can wear its heritage lightly, speaking not only to a moment of creation, but also to the economies from which it emerges. Although globalization tends to flatten history and context, amid this leveling of difference, anime has proven to be perennially popular, thriving in our ever more interconnected world, with the style not just becoming substance, but subsuming it.

Seen through Duffy’s selection, the global influence of anime is deeply intertwined with its sweeping fandom. The evolution of anime from niche interest to global phenomenon, enabled by an ever expanding marketability, has resulted in a singular aesthetic confluence, surpassing all limitations of origin and becoming an international style all its own. The House of Pikachu surveys the broader implications of the intense enthusiasm of an ever expanding anime fanbase and an idiosyncratic blend of art and commerce that has undeniably altered visual culture at large. Such love is not born in a vacuum; even in more market driven works, the worlds of anime series often reward attention paid with rich world building and multidimensional characters. While produced with equal commercial calculation, Disney animation frequently offers a circumscribed world of predictable outcomes, possibility appended for storytelling efficiency, while the realms seen onscreen in a Hayao Miyazaki film appear to be awash in potentiality, the golden light of a new day seemingly always raking across the characters. These are complicated stories with morality that is rarely binary, few clear resolutions, and lessons learned perhaps only partially or not at all. For a generation, Pikachu was undoubtedly an entry point into the world of Japanese animation and comics and their multi-platform fandom. Through this admittedly kid-friendly aperture, it was possible to catch a glimpse of a different world, a domain of sophisticated mature storytelling, but above all, for those whose attention was grabbed, it served as an entry into an intimate world of fandom. Although ostensibly built upon a Pokémon-centered framework, Duffy’s curation does not ignore the larger evolution of anime and its reception in the 1990s, as well as it attaining a global reach in its selection. Like the inspiring source material, the scope is vast.

The 1990s—formative years for many of the featured artists—while marking the beginnings of the nascent growth of anime and Japanese culture as a world-spanning force, were a turbulent time in Japan. Although the decade would begin with the costumed romantic fantasia of Sailor Moon and the triumphal looping story arcs of muscular heroics in Dragon Ball Z, after the collapse of the real estate driven economy, to be swiftly followed by the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the Aum Shinrikyo cult’s Tokyo subway sarin gas attacks, a darker interiority could be glimpsed in some of the most popular anime being produced at the time. While not explicit responses to these events, Hideaki Anno’s 1995 Neon Genesis Evangelion chronicled the esoteric battles of a war-weary populace, and Masamune Shirow’s series Ghost in the Shell, explored the pains of digitally-defined existence. Both achieved explosive success, striking a nerve at a moment when Japanese society was enmeshed in upheaval. This febrile atmosphere also saw the rise of the original video animation (or OVA), enabled by the expanding world of home video, a new path toward monetization that allowed for increasingly lavish projects to be produced as well as the ability to make extensive back catalogues more easily available in foreign markets. For the budding anime fan, it was a golden era of discovery, if it was at times hampered by poor quality translations and hapless dubbing. In the sheer abundance suddenly available was an ecstatic newness, seemingly foretelling a world of greater permeability and cultural exchange through a medium that was able to speak in so many voices to so many people.

Julien Ceccaldi draws upon this profusion in his gallery-spanning A Collection of Little Memories (2025). In this near life-size composition, five figures stand on a gantry overlooking industrial ruin, extended into the space of sculpture with the addition of a steel staircase, paying homage to a towering reclining creature. One of the figures leans down to kiss the creature’s massive outstretched finger while another, sharply dressed, tosses an apple core toward it. Is this a pageant of desire or obligation? Are the offerings witnessed made out of devotion or terror? The figures in Ceccaldi’s tableau of lucid dread seem resigned to their own specific roles, while amid the creature’s rippling flesh, a limpid sexuality courses through the scene. Ceccaldi’s work, rife with scenes of collusive eroticism, makes use of many period-specific anime tropes, including the lanky battle-hardened bodies of Buronson’s Fist of the North Star and the spasmodic violence of Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s Akira, creating an insular iconography, both familiar and jarring. The monstrous figure, mostly seen as a swollen balding head pockmarked with veiny growths, stares out, his arresting gaze directed toward the viewer, eyes ringed with stylized specular highlights. Participation with the work is reordered with the sculptural appendage, complicating the sexualized doomscape further while questioning the inherent tensions of gallery spectatorship.

The iconography of catastrophe, as well as the complicity of its viewers, plays an outsized role in many contemporary anime and is a primary focus of the work of Brazilian artist Yuli Yamagata, who often highlights acts of brutality through their deconstruction. Bullet in the Forehead (2024) transforms the titular violence into a gauzy spread of fabric, foam, and lamé, the gore restyled into a haze of sateen fibers, while the veins of the dying eyes are rendered as heavily stitched crimson seams. In this reimagining of an unsparing scene from the intensely violent anime Genocyber, the head is reordered into spiraling bulging masses of globular forms of fabric, the batting straining to contain the explicit violence, in the process attenuating the sequence with a near Duchampian glee. Although ruthless in its depiction of violence, the near obsessive detail with which the creators of Genocyber render it has long been considered a hallmark of anime, a practiced building of worlds with distinctive visual acuity often seen as lacking in Western animation and comics. This artistic rigor—the dizzying contrasts of the micro and macro it yields—has long inspired devotion, buttressed into a circularity of content through the ready availability of reams of tie-in merchandise. The underlying foundations of the expansive scope of this following form a core component of the work of Teppei Kaneuji and Yoshitaka Amano, both strongly represented. Though members of different generations, both artists have spent their careers creating work responsive to the ramifications of otaku-style fandom, exploring the pop cultural footprint of anime—in the case of Amano, often revisiting the imagery of series he had a hand in popularizing, and for Kaneuji, examining the expanded repercussions of its marketed legacy. In Kaneuji’s “New Teenage Fan Club” series, figurines are covered with the removable hairpieces of anime characters from collectible model kits, enshrouding them in the obsessive level of detail demanded by fans. The smaller scale of the figures used in Teenage Fan Club #67 – #72 (2015) call particular attention to the intricacy of the hairdos, their endless range of colors illustrating the sheer array of characters available. These works are both a rejoinder to the scope of consumerism as well as a celebration of the luxuriance in the attention paid to these series through their merchandise, with meaning accruing unexpectedly through calculated detail.

Amano’s storied career as an illustrator has mostly been witnessed through the endless reproduction of its adapted end products, notably the character designs for the Final Fantasy game series. His work has become synonymous with anime fandom, drawing upon a mythological historicization and figures that have a signature wan grace. With eyes half-lidded, they appear to exist uneasily among Art Nouveau-styled visual circumlocutions of which they seem to have grown weary. An exhibition centerpiece, Amano’s Time and Light (2018) has the glossy fit and finish of an aircraft fuselage, counterbalancing the delicacy of the swirling scene in which a nude woman and an armored knight appear to take flight astride their respective equine mounts. Although the piece is painstakingly rendered with the contoured density of a woodblock print, its scale and sheen have more in common with the lacquered critique of James Rosenquist’s magisterial paean to 1960s-era militarized consumer culture, F-111 (1964–65), than to the transitory beauty captured in ukiyo-e scenes.

Jarod Lew’s photograph, Pikachu and Friends (Liana) (2022), depicts the Pokémon embraced by the arms of a largely unseen person emerging from a mound of plush toys on a bed. In this image, taken from a larger series of tableaus captured in the homes of young Asian Americans’ parents, the assumptions come readily, and it seems reasonable to ask if these toys are a sentimental collection or a blockading defense mechanism. Both are possibilities, and a celebration of youth and the purity of childhood pleasures need not be inherently infantilizing. Lew’s photograph is one of the myriad portrayals of Pikachu offered in a gallery dedicated to them. Among the works, two specifically commissioned by the Asia Society. Loc Huynh’s The Card Sharks and Gao Hang’s Pikachu (both 2025) venture deeply into millennial nostalgia, questioning the origins of youthful fandom, but offer a limited appraisal. Huynh’s mural captures children playing the compulsively collectible Pokémon card game, or perhaps merely planning more advantageous trades, while in Hang’s depiction of Pikachu his angularity is exaggerated, recalling the confines of the pixel grid. Hang has produced this work as part of a series of surfaceless low-fidelity renderings of anime heroes, all triangulated in a specific moment of gaming culture, recapturing the reduced polygon counts of early three-dimensional graphics, their edges dulled like the memories of the games themselves. In both of the works, Pikachu is a nostalgic gateway, his time shifting capacity as a uniquely millennial referent exploited, a mental image unchanged by the technological change for those who grew up under its aegis.

Many dismiss anime as a visual shorthand for youth, perhaps due in part to the vacant commercial gloss of kawaii-style cuteness, or the imagined simplicity of the sequential inevitability of animation and comics. For those who grew up in thrall with its style, anime has maintained a never-ending currency, its shared vocabulary increasingly spoken widely and fluently. Meaning accrues through such collective experience, and in this expansive pluralism there is value to be found before and after the battle is over, while the arc of a dauntless kick slices through the air and in the crackling verve of Pikachu’s lightning bolt shaped tail. In The House of Pikachu, it is possible to trace the trajectory of an aesthetic and witness the unskeining of influence. This is the narrative of culture, the ways in which it forms, what is retained or lost, how it is fostered and appropriated into the world at large, not unlike each freshly invented Pokemon, awaiting capture.