Makoto Aida

‘E-Baka’
May 6 to June 5, 2010
Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo


Ash Color Mountain (Work in Progress) (2009- ), acrylic on canvas, 300 x 700 cm.

An artist of prodigious technical proficiency, Makoto Aida generally employs his talent to perverse ends. A case in point is his new work Ash Color Mountain (Work in Progress) (2009- ), which depicts scores upon scores of Japanese salarymen in drab business suits piled on top of each other into peaked mountains that resemble those often found in Chinese and Japanese ink landscape paintings. At 3 by 7 meters, the work’s monumental scale and exactingly detailed execution take an idea – the critique of social conformity – and repeat it to absurdity, and then a redundancy that borders on nihilism in a mandala-like ritualistic effect. It should come as no surprise that Aida once made a text painting that reads in Japanese, “Naiyou ga nai yo,” a throwaway pun that translates loosely to “there is no content.”

Ash Color Mountain is currently on display in Aida’s first exhibition at Mizuma Art Gallery’s new venue in Tokyo’s Ichigaya-Tamachi neighborhood, “E-Baka.” Aida has taken advantage of the gallery’s expansive architecture to make not one but several large-scale works. Stretching 10 meters across two walls, Encounter of the Fat and Slim with Ten-thousand Yen Bill Background (2008-10) features grotesque fluorescent pink and green forms resembling vapor trails, atom clouds, spools of ejuculate and intestines all at once, against a background of enlarged 10,000-yen notes arranged as in a printers’ template. Aida has also returned for the first time in 25 years to oil painting, in which he majored at university. Entitled 1+1=2 (2010), this almost two-by-five-meter painting’s lurid mix of hastily slapped together mauve, green, blue and yellow hues reveals itself, from the right distance, to depict the titular equation.


Installation view of “E-Baka” with 1+1=2 visible on lefthand side and Encounter of the Fat and Slim with Ten-thousand Yen Bill Background visible on right.

Also on display near the gallery entrance are a new video and two smaller works on paper. The video, Yokaman (2010), features young nude girls, who appear one at a time before a backdrop of monochrome dessan life-study drawings pinned in a grid on a wall. Obscuring their vaginas with bamboo baskets held in their hands, the girls dance and sing a ribald ditty about their “goodiecunts” for the camera. This video was paralleled at the exhibition opening by a live performance of a nude man who stood on a construction platform at one end of the gallery and, with a champagne bottle stuck between his legs, sang a counterpart ditty. Aida says that the original, male version of the song has been a popular party game at art universities since before World War II and that these performances address the now majority-female Japanese art university system, also alluded to by the life drawings, which are a requisite part of the national curriculum.

Viewed in tandem with the other works in exhibition, the video helps to clarify the roots of an ambivalent strain in Aida’s work referencing native-Japanese modernism, primarily the nihonga painting that has long been a major school of art in Japan, and which emphasizes pictorial figuration over conceptual strategy. Aida has appropriated nihonga styles for works that depict nubile girls chained like dogs, their limbs amputated, and he has revisited the “war pictures” genre of propaganda painting to imagine alternative histories of World War II. He also states that Ash Color Mountain is a companion piece to his work Blender (2001), which imagines a vortex of schoolgirls being pulped in a giant blender. Yet the video also reveals a limitation of that project: for all its provocation, it’s all academic.

All images: Photo Kei Miyajima, © Makoto Aida. Courtesy Mizuma Art Gallery

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