“Bad good” art style from Japan, favoring naive and childlike art over polish. Encourages people to draw, feel momentum and expansion
Origins from “anti-illustration” around 1980, pioneered by Teruhiko Yumura of Flamingo Studio
Teruhiko Yumura image hierarchy:
- Heta-uma: unskilled good
- Heta-heta: unskilled bad
- Uma-uma: skilled good
- Uma-heta: skilled bad
Uma-Uma, it’s something like a professional-looking picture made by a professional, in short, it’s boring. Uma-Heta illustration is the worst. It relies only on technique and has no passions, because it was produced in conscious effort to make it as good-looking as possible. When this effort happens to result in a Heta-Heta image, there’s very little difference from a Heta-Uma illustration. We must not underestimate Heta-Heta illustrations.
Uma-uma: so much of American commercial illustration falls into this Uma-heta: obsession with learning realism as skill and valorizing it because we can’t see or honor merit of art beyond it replicating what we already know
How ugliness redefined Japan’s art scene
Connections: ugly drawings from Korea Hundertwasser Naive art