In conversation with Attiyyah Rahman and Mathijs Hunfeld

Interview with Attiyah Rahman

Arc 2:
There’s been a lot of usage of Anime or Anime aesthetic in recent years, and the rapidly growing Western audience for the industry is creating new dialogues and interpretations of Japanese media. Where do you situate yourself in the interpretation of cultural media?

Rahman:
I think the position in which I situate myself and my work changes semi-frequently, purely because of the nature of the medium I engage with, and the variety of contexts that are connected to and inform it. At the time when I was first exploring anime and manga within a contemporary fine-art context, the medium still felt quite unknown and not as recognised and mainstream as it is at current. It felt somewhat easier to appropriate things. I think it’s quite difficult now to make critical work that embodies familiar anime aesthetics, especially when you know the majority of your audience will be viewing the work through an online platform, where everything you see and engage with is just an image of something. I’d like to think I situate myself and my work somewhere in-between the question, while also existing in a place just outside of it; the visuals are familiar enough to be associated with anime and manga, yet they are reduced just enough to be considered instructional or semiotical. While the majority of my early work took direct inspiration from typical anime aesthetics, my most recent development of the last three years combines minimalist corporate elements (originally inspired by the figurative visuals located within aircraft safety manuals) with a loosely connected Shojo manga style. Similar to the work of artists Julian Opie or KYNE, I adopt a recurring character who is my muse, and in a way, I try to find ways to exhaust his image through repetition. I’m also influenced by the layering methods of traditional anime cell painting, yet from a digital perspective. I was drawn to the minimalist nature of thick rounded lines and solid colours for the fact that it is a highly precise style of drawing, and I like to play with how much detail or aliveness I endow my character with.

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^{(left) Julian Opie, 2022 and (right) KYNE, 2021}

Arc 2: The salaryman theme seemed like a deep dive into Japanese culture—what made you explore Japanese social contexts like that?

Rahman:
I’ve found there’s been a lot of recent popularity surrounding corporate aesthetics, particularly from a fashion-related lens. For me, this fixation also seems to exist within a specific decade, somewhere within the “when things were good” bubble (pre-2020 for starters). I left education two years ago and have been in full-time work since to support myself, while still trying to continue making my art in the background. I work in retail, and as a result it has made me attuned to consumer culture from a selling aspect, which filters into the work-culture theme as a whole. At current, I’m interested in the representations of these themes within film, art and other forms of media. I’m thinking of American Psycho (2000), The Secretary (2002), the work of Anna Uddenberg, the viral ‘Office Siren’ trend, and especially Kaneoya Sackiko’s long-standing interpretation of the salaryman, to give some examples. A lot of my work has an underlying discomfort to it, an impending threat, or a hidden force of sorts, internalised within the character or situation depicted, which is often connected to a power dynamic that extends into the relationship between the viewer and the work—who is controlling, or seducing who? I’ve always had a fascination for the figure of the salaryman within a Japanese context, as someone who is non-Japanese and grew up within a Western environment. The cultural difference will never not be interesting for me. I find the figure of the young man adorning the suit to be quite a romanticised image, and I’ve often located this same figure within high-fashion editorials, film and television, video-games and 1940s military aesthetics. I’m still exploring what this version of the ‘moe boy’ still really means to me, but perhaps he is just growing up.

AH2

^{(left) Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, 1995 and (right) Ai no Kusabi, 2012}

Arc 2: Why do you think the cute and harmless aesthetic is effective for discussions of currently urgent topics for you?

Rahman:
Within the context of the West’s fascination for cuteness within Japanese culture, the aesthetic is hugely popular and always will be, therefore it is widely recognised by many different communities. It’s also very digestible material, difficult to miss and quite easy to capture attention. The more I consciously work with cuteness and harmlessness, I think more about the urgency and the seriousness of the topics that sit beneath these surfaces. It’s important to not forget what this cuteness may truly embody, or where it came from. A similar example of this is the origin of Sanrio’s Hello Kitty, and how she became a super successful post-war product to help rebuild Japan’s image after WWII. For me, the aesthetic is closely related with ideas surrounding submission, power and threat; see-sawing dualities that seem to create more questions than answers, ones that often look to destabilise the rationality within my work, or provoke a kind of uncertainty. I ultimately use the cute and harmless aesthetic as a way to explore situations that may feel unsafe or considered taboo.

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^{KITE, 1998}

Interview with Mathijs Hunfeld

Arc 2:
There’s been a prevalent pattern in post-internet artmaking where industrial textures and smooth silhouettes are fetishised over content. These works, when situated in a white cube space, whether intentional or not, brought 3D renders to life, turning physical space into a complete copy of the synthetic. As someone with a design background and an art practice, what are your thoughts on this era’s Instagrammable art?

Hunfeld:
I think Instagrammable art is ultimately about statistics, understanding what people engage with most and what generates the highest return. In that sense, it’s not fundamentally different from other systems. In the art market, for example, abstract paintings with a lot of red or blue often achieve higher auction premiums, not because those colors have inherent value, but because certain systems begin rewarding specific characteristics.

Instagram works in much the same way. As the focus shifts from people to artworks, the same logic applies: if the goal is visibility and circulation, the work naturally adopts the visual language that the system rewards. I see this dynamic as one in which the visual begins as a response to the platform itself, which has already defined the conditions under which it can succeed.

My practice tries to engage with how our visual culture has become detached from place and time. You can trace an image back to the software that produced it rather than the context it came from. What software was used or which AI model generated it? Those questions have become more relevant than where it was made, what moment it belonged to, or what cultural context produced it. In a way, history, geography, and locality have merged into a visual landscape where we only count surface value. Coming from a product design background, I think I'm naturally interested in systems and in how things function rather than just how they look. That's probably why I keep translating digital spaces and processes into physical form. I find that translation incredibly engaging because it gives these systems weight, scale, and context, rather than leaving them on a universal media grid.

The series WORLDWIDE, which I am currently working on, is about understanding how digital systems shape how we see, what we value, and how those values feed back into the images and objects we produce. Online spaces have generated an almost endless amount of communication, and with that, an endless amount of friction, contradiction, and conflict. I'm looking to make this friction into a materialised experience through this feedback loop.

This ecstatic form of decline is one of the reasons I bring digital aesthetics into physical space, materialising the visual logic of digital platforms, 3D environments, interfaces, and AI-generated imagery into physical objects and installations. I think experiencing something physically is fundamentally different and creates an interaction that you simply can't deny. Online, everything exists on the same surface, where a war and a smiling holiday photo occupy exactly the same amount of space in a feed. Inside a white cube it changes as the outside world temporarily falls away and the work is given a stage where someone can actually inhabit it.

So rather than asking whether Instagrammable art is good or bad, I'm more interested in understanding why it functions the way it does. By mimicking systems such as endless transitions, slop aesthetics, personal isolation, and self-promotion, and placing them back onto specific bodies, surfaces, or objects, they begin to feel unstable or difficult to sustain. It's about taking the conditions of online culture and translating them into something that exists in the physical world to challenge those same values.

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^{(up) HIGH RISK OF FALLING and (down) 10X - PRINT SERIES by Mathijs Hunfeld}

Arc 2: Your works seemed to combine pop culture reference with information and material consumption, creating a humorous spin on the gaze towards commodity – almost bringing life to inanimate objects through instructions. Did this approach stem from your personal experience or was it a culmination of past research?

Hunfeld:
Often, I find myself on the sidelines of the industries and themes I research. I'm not fully immersed, and a lot of my work is really me trying to understand where I sit within all of this.

Pop culture has become a natural point of entry because it is almost a heightened, universalised version of everyday life. Whether it's a celebrity, a consumer product, a brand, or an online trend, they're shared points of reference that show how value, aspiration, identity, and communication are constructed at a much larger scale. Observing those spaces from the sidelines has naturally shaped the way I work.

Research became a way of giving shape to those observations. My interest has remained less in the products themselves than in the systems that produce, circulate, and assign value to them. It's these background systems that quietly determine how products, images, and information move and who gets to engage with them.

A work like 10X is a good example of that. The product tag itself becomes the product. An object that's normally only there to communicate information or facilitate circulation suddenly becomes the central subject.

By pushing these systems to their extreme, almost celebrating them to the point where they become excessive, they start to undermine themselves. Satire becomes a way of taking those familiar references to their ultimate form, where they begin to implode under the weight of their own logic. It is in that shift from familiarity to collapse that the work becomes interesting to me. Something completely ordinary suddenly reveals the values and assumptions that were holding it together in the first place.

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^{NOW, I'LL BE AN ANGEL by Mathijs Hunfeld}