A surge of cartoon swept through global art world at the turn of the millennium. While swarming major exhibitions, museums, and the art market, it resembles popular forms and aesthetics of comics, animation, video games, and toys. Why is cartoon art booming simultaneously at this time? What sustains its extraordinary global appeal and relevance as contemporary art? How does it reshape art, production, artist careers, and art history? How does it function within the broader topography of cultural production? What kinds of historical dialogue and visual discourse are articulated and extended through its abstract, symbolic language? To answer these questions, this study examines three prominent cases: Murakami Takashi and Superflat, The Cartoon Generation, and KAWS. These case studies, adopting a transculturally informed historical perspective and interdisciplinary framework, trace heterogeneous trajectories and power politics of cartoon art from the 1990s through the early 21st century, a period marked by unprecedented cultural shifts powered by globalisation and digital revolution, and an expanding global contemporary art.
I argue that cartoon is adopted as a method of self-reflection and subversion from within the ecology of art and contemporary visual production. It enables artmaking to interrogate and intervene in current political and socio-economic relations. Through its pragmatic engagement with popular culture, creative industry, countercultural expressions, and daily consumption, it presents a unique lens for addressing present crises and reoriented roles of art in search of new “avant-garde” possibilities that respond to changing social and technological conditions of production, visualisation, and imagination. Its language of flattening and mutation articulates layers of contested history, aesthetic tradition, and vernacular experience in forming the global synchronicity. Their embodiment of sign fetishism expresses underlying art infrastructures, circuits of value, as well as tactics of resistance in their embracing and transgression of industrial and institutional frameworks. Through these instances of ambiguity and controversy, this empirical research responds to inquiries of global art history and bridges the gap between existing narrative and actual social and political-economic constructs of contemporary art production beyond conventional “centres”. By focusing primarily on East Asia, the study offers an alternative perspective on evolving globalism and world perceptions shaped by confluence, change, and precarity.