Relation of Cute/Kawaii Aesthetics and Beauty in Street Art Production

Abstract

As an independent visual expression, street art won its position in urban culture at the beginning of the 1990s. Different techniques used to present ideas, such as spraying, stencilling, putting up stickers or paste-ups, doing site specific interventions and so on, allowed artists to develop them more carefully and with a particular sense of the public space. Since 2008 and Lewisohn’s study Street Art; The Graffiti Revolution, street art has been the subject of academic research on many occasions. However, the issue of cute/kawaii features in street art has not yet been the subject of extensive research. This paper attempts to find out in what kind of relation within street art discourse we can place the aesthetic concepts of beauty and that of cute/kawaii, and whether a trend of producing cute/kawaii street art can be identified. Concepts of Western cute and Japanese kawaii will be compared, and the relationship between the concept of cute/kawaii and that of beauty will be addressed. Seen trough different aesthetic theories an effort is made to understand the relation between these two opposing and yet today very close concepts. There is also the question of a possible natural affection on the part of the viewers for the small and cute things, which we can usually find in stickers and paste-ups. As a result this study raises a broader question: to what extent is cute/kawaii aesthetics taking over the place of beauty in street art.