Notes
This is the original watercolour and ink drawing, after which a series of prints were subsequently produced.
Aida Makoto has emerged as one of the most versatile practitioners in the world of Japanese contemporary art today. The ease with which he maneuvers his way through the existing spectrum of artistic tropes is unparalleled and the tremendous volume of his works is frankly impressive. Constrained neither by a recognizable style nor by a desire to please, Aida Makoto relishes in his freedom to create in every format and constantly challenges the boundaries of propriety. Taboo subjects, sensitive issues and anti-nationalist sentiments are the forbidden fruit that the artist bites heartily into. The artist is not toying with controversy for its shock value but is merely braving the polemic of a Japanese identity in a post-war age—he continues to uncover every symptom he can detect and endeavours to generate a self-reflective discourse.
While Aida Makoto capitalizes on the pathology of Japanese society, he himself never concealed his own idiosyncrasies growing up and does not deny his weaknesses as a man native to his wrought country. His profound shyness toward women and inordinate love for manga during adolescence are qualities shared with the better part of the Japanese male population in the past few decades. He has never made a secret of his struggle with the same psychosis that has plagued the entire nation since the denouement of the war. Having witnessed and fully aware of the unspeakable atrocities committed during the war only to see it end in a severely disgraceful capitulation, Aida Makoto along with his peers are thrown into a subcultural condition where violence reigns and can only be neutralized with the imperialization of hapless girls. The visual epidemic of grotesquerie juxtaposed against kawaii (cute) was thus born. Under the artist's dexterous hand and impeccable eye, the most acute of erotic and sadistic imagery comes to light.
Possibly one of the most iconic images attributed to Aida Makoto is The Giant Member Fuji VS King Gidora (Lot 346). The unapologetically explicit composition of the work is simply unforgettable. The setting is of metropolitan Japan, where the familiar streets are lined with commercial as well as residential buildings with the occasional vehicle scattered in between. A larger-than-life, or rather, giant "Fuji Member" refers to Akiko Fuji, a member of The Science Patrol in the famous TV-series "Ultraman". She has toppled over and is lying on her back having demolished all edifices below her, thoroughly defeated with her hand still holding onto her weapon. Ravaging her in every way possible is King Gidora with its signature three heads and fan-like wings, the archenemy of Godzilla. Both shows were wildly popular ever since their inception—their imagery engrained and canonized in the cultural memory of the Japanese public. While the identity of the depicted figures in this picture might not be immediately obvious to the foreign eye, the citing of primary characters from such well-known shows would escape no one among the Japanese audience. Yet beneath the blatant reference to elements of contemporary popular culture is a deeper layer of allusion to one of the most celebrated works of modern Japan's ukiyo-e, the art of the floating world. The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (alternately titled Girl Diver and Two Octopi) by Hokusai Katsuhika is a famous example of Japanese shunga or erotica. The woodblock print portrays a woman lying in ecstasy as she is sexually engaged with two sea creatures.
In an attempt to underscore the evolutionary path that connects the two major phases of Japanese visual history, Aida Makoto presents us with this very work. Television shows with a tendency toward aliens and supernatural powers of today's Japan and the woodblock prints of the floating world that gained unprecedented popularity in medieval Japan are and were criticized by many at their respective periods for their low-brow nature and lewd subject matter. In truth, both are simply the most honest manifestations of national psychology. It is this very dialectic between high and low art that Aida Makoto sets out to investigate and in fact, labours to obliterate. Thus within this composition, the two forms of visual expression join forces and are elevated to the rarefied realm of fine art under the artist's skilful hand. It is with this revolutionary as well as stunning work that the artist believes himself to have gained entry into the Japanese contemporary art world. The original large 3.1 by 4.1M version of The Giant Member Fuji VS King Gidora, which is reproduced in virtually every publication that features the artist, is currently part of the Takahashi Collection in Japan.
Another notorious group of drawings and sculptures by Aida Makoto is the Edible Artificial Girls, Mi-Mi Chan series executed in 2001. Mi-Mi on the Chopping Board (Lot 347) is one of these works. Though not as overtly graphic as The Giant Member Fuji VS King Gidora, the fundamental male impulse is glaringly clear. A body of text that accompanies the series reads in translation as follows:
Welcome to our restaurant specializing in Edible Artificial Girls "MIMI"!
It all started in the year 3000 when mankind was tormented with hunger caused by worldwide food shortages.
The founder, old Aida, a molecular biologist, was distressed at the seriousness of the situation, and devoted himself day and night to his studies.
Finally, he achieved a great breakthrough in generating a brand new creature called "Edible Artificial Girls, Mi-Mi" derived from the DNA of colitis germs.
Mi-Mi is very savory and rich in nutrition which the name implies. (The character pronounced Mi-Mi is a rhyme of Bimi which denotes deliciousness.)
Mi-Mi was served all over the world. People were also touched by Mi-Mi's lovely appearance, and innocent nature, her only intention being a devotion to giving herself to fulfilling the appetite of men.
Her pure heart would be worth comparing with the hare in the ancient Indian legend who is said to throw its body into the fire and to become a star in the night sky.
Mi-Mi with no sense of pain, and no fear of death by nature is also regarded as an ideal creature for food from the viewpoint of the humanitarian.
After the emergence of Mi-Mi, the bad habit of eating the meat of farm animals died out.
Mi-Mi, who can be your good companion or kept in food storage, has taken a firm hold within our life-style in the role of a pet.
With the great development of new flavors, we can now count more than five thousand varieties of Mi-Mi. Mi-Mi provides most of food on the earth.
Today, we have the honor of opening the second restaurant on Mars under the direct management of the market. We deeply appreciate your ongoing patronage.
We are pleased to offer a good time from the hand-skilled bio-confectioners handed down since our foundation.[1]
Seething with mockery, the concocted text is a testimony to the artist's love of embracing the ludicrous. Aida Makoto goes as far as to wielding cannibalism in his allegory of a man's sexual appetite. In Mi-Mi on the Chopping Board, Mi-Mi lies complacent on a damp chopping board while a knife ominously wavers around the lower right corner. Several other Mi-Mi's stay motionless in a bowl of water, doubtless the subsequent victims to be executed on the chopping board. In this series, Aida Makoto takes the objectification of women to the extreme. Nubile, naked bodies of youthful, beautiful girls are but a unit of consumption, in this case, literal consumption as Mi-Mi Chan's are meant to be eaten. The artist is undaunted and confronts his own desires through playing out pictorially the fantasies of what probably is the majority of Japanese males. The commodification followed by the eventual submission of the cute, kawaii young woman constitutes a powerful force that drives the rampant subculture of contemporary Japan.
One of the masterpieces from Aida Makoto's thoroughly monumental series War Picture Returns is Gate Ball (Lot 348), a work on imitation Japanese vellum mounted onto sliding doors bound into a two-panel folding screen. A total of eleven screens was made for the series. The darkest cynicism within the artist is made manifest in this work as he paints without a shred of unease his most sinister, albeit fictional, vision of warfare. The element of satire is not lost either, it never is in his work, for this series, titled War Picture Returns, is clearly intended as sequels to Japanese pro-war propaganda during the Pacific War. The artist is not afraid to take war imagery further and hyperbolizes freely the brutality and horror of Japanese criminal, or even inhumane, deeds—he is resolute in coercing his fellow countrymen into witnessing their own fraught history and thus confronting a national disgrace.
As is his customary practice, Aida Makoto sets out to create a series with a set of self-imposed regulations in mind. For War Picture Returns, the artist lays out his creative principles:
"The common format for this series is as follows: painting with cheap art supplies as quickly as possible on a folding screen made of disused fusuma doors (a Japanese traditional type of sliding door) cheaply connected by hinges, and putting them on some nearby pedestals, such as beer cases, which exhibited. This was because I thought an attitude similar to the "folk guerillas" (Japanese antiwar meetings on the street with people singing and playing folk songs in the late 60's and early 70's)—considering the direct conveyance of a message more important than crafted high-quality finished forms—was appropriate for this subject matter."[2]
In this, one can infer the artist's penchant for spontaneity and the value he places on a direct conveyance of ideas. If indeed Aida Makoto did scurry his way through painting Gate Ball, the level of detail and depth of significance achieved are simply remarkable. For this work in particular, he derived his narrative framework not from his native country's war pictures but from those of the Asian countries that suffered as a result of Japanese militarism.
In the painting, a harmless game of gate ball is depicted. As if nothing is amiss, the players, all horribly disfigured, miscoloured Japanese seniors with menacing countenances, drag around, strike at, step on and rip heads off of their fellow Asians. Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that Aida Makoto's bloody allegory is meticulously fleshed out with details. The playing field is made up of the geography of Asia. The gates are crowned with well-known cultural symbols, such as the Merlion in Santosa of Singaporean fame, the colourful arches that cover the temples and palaces of China, a torii (traditional Japanese gate commonly guarding the entry to a Shinto shrine) as well as the flag of Manchukuo, Japan's puppet state between 1932 and 1945 that covered parts of Manchuria and Mongolia. Through these gates, the players hit the balls, or rather, the severed heads still dripping with blood—one is wearing a chada (traditional golden Thai crown/headdress of a conical shape), signifying his Thai origin, other heads are wearing braids tied with red ribbon, an awfully stereotypical perception of Chinese people, another head is wearing a taqiyah, the short, rounded Muslim cap and on the very bottom, a head of darker skin suggesting a South Asian ethnicity. Gate Ball is plainly a picture of Japanese imperialism at its absolute ugliest.
It takes a courageous soul to probe the human condition and express what he sees in candor. Reared and indoctrinated by a country so invested in keeping its glossy façade intact, Aida Makoto inadvertently assumed the role of social critic. His relentless commitment to reality and doggedness toward revealing the underbelly of Japanese society make him one of the most enigmatic and unpredictable artists today. In every one of his images, he manages to conflate elements of aesthetic, satire, fantasy and often violence and eroticism. While his works cannot but enhance and accentuate the lunacy of contemporary Japan, they ultimately contribute to a broader and deeper understanding of his native country.
[1] Makoto, Aida, Monument for Nothing: Makoto Aida (Tokyo: Graphic-sha Publishing Co., 2007): p. 94.
[2] Ibid. p. 217.
