Murakami-mania hit New York last week as the "Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture" exhibition at the Japan Society opened to much media fanfare. But the scope of this ambitious project and the "Murakami influence," as the New York Times dubbed it, is not only limited to the confines of the Japan Society. For the next three months the purveyors of what Alexandra Munroe, director of the Japan Society Gallery, calls "Japan's psyche" will infiltrate the New York subway systems and shopping districts with posters and public art and inject a dose of the kawaii (cute) into this least kawaii of cities. Curated by Takashi Murakami, the bad boy of Japanese "neo-pop" art (he of Roppongi Hills and Louis Vuitton fame), "Little Boy" is the final installment of his "Superflat" trilogy. The trilogy project, launched in 2001 with the "Superflat" exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, was followed by the second "Coloriage" exhibition at the Fondation Cartier de L'art Contemporain in Paris a year later. Both "Superflat" and "Coloriage" presented a catch-all for popular Japanese arts based on their "flat," cartoon-like style and sci-fi-inspired creativity. This new exhibition is touted as pushing beyond the mere surface optics of Japanese pop culture, and embarking on an exercise in social psychoanalysis. [JAPAN TIMES via Agenda Inc.]