Study of a bad boy of Japanese art
Makoto Aida shocks with his work, but he's an equal-opportunities offender, finds David McNeill
Is Makoto Aida a misogynist? It seems a fair question. Among his cheerfully scattershot collection at the Mori Art Museum is a series of -style paintings called , showing naked young women with severed and bandaged limbs being led around on a leash. A 62-minute video depicts the artist tediously masturbating in front of the kanji characters "beautiful young girl". In , he uses more naked girls to make a bloody milkshake. What was the thinking there? "Well," he says, smiling, "If I made a shake with men it wouldn't taste very good."
That reply - glib, irreverent and a bit irritating - is vintage Aida. As Mori curator David Elliott says in his introduction to the largest-ever exhibition of Aida's work, covering a quarter of a century: "Nothing seems to add up - on purpose."
Aida often resembles a clever but alienated schoolboy, scrawling caricatures of the teachers and tossing peppery one-liners from the back of the class. And like the schoolboy he becomes squirmy and inarticulate when asked to discuss the "meaning" of his art, although he's happier describing its origins. "I can't really explain this stuff," he says. "That's why I draw, I suppose."
His own Japanese title for the Mori exhibition, "Sorry for Being a Genius", gives perhaps a more apt flavour of the 47-year-old's boyish, provocative sense of humour.
Is he a purveyor of Japanese revenge fantasies? Hardly - Aida's an equal opportunity offender. In (1999), smiling pensioners play croquet with the severed heads of Asian children. Just in case we miss the message, the croquet team is called "Great East Asia", a nod to wartime Japan's bloody imperialist project, the "Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere".
, drawn in the style of a traditional folding screen painting, depicts a Shinto torii gate reminiscent of the entrance to the Yasukuni Shrine, Tokyo's controversial war memorial. In the corner is the legend: "tenno-heika banzai" (Long Live the Emperor!), the slogan on the dying lips of wartime Japanese soldiers. It might be a joke, simultaneously using the codes of wartime propaganda while undermining them, but a dark one: the slogan is written in the actual blood of a young man - as close to an antiwar statement as he gets.
Aida denies having any clear political intent in his work and says he doesn't like "simple left or right" polemic - or what he calls political correctness. "I'm not the type of person who thinks about politically stimulating or shocking people into changing society," he says at the Mori. "I didn't create those pieces to announce that I'm simply anti-war."
But he accepts that the two great blocs of recent Japanese history - the hubristic, decadent decade until 1990 and the near quarter century of decline, dislocation and social ennui that has followed - have profoundly shaped him. For a start, he says, he's surrounded by a subculture of Otaku fan-boys and what he calls "real perverts".
"Compared to them I'm quite refined. I was raised in that culture, I read and so in a sense I'm one of them - I was influenced by that. But I try to be a serious artist so I have to honestly reflect it."
That's partly the thinking behind his sometimes puerile depictions of the fairer sex, such as a -style painting called , showing women in revealing underwear. "Young boys can be quite sick," he says, smiling again. "They hate girls, in a way, and those are the images that go through their minds."
The post-bubble years are satirised in pieces that are at once inane, witty and cruel. A 2007 oil-on-canvas shows a gap-toothed farmer joyfully pulling a bumper crop of Louis Vuitton bags from the soil. In , salarymen fire themselves up for the day ahead with pep drinks and futile pledges to (keep going) before vomiting in drunken disarray. One of his most famous pieces, (2009-11), depicts mountains of dead salarymen, Holocaust-style - a shocking if vulgar meditation on Japan's post-bubble decline.
Disaster also fills his imagination. Aida says he recalls the older generation discussing the war, and the constant threat of earthquakes in his native Niigata prefecture, long before the Tohoku disaster of March 11, 2011. He says he's especially aware the disaster seems to have accelerated the sense among many of his contemporaries that the old certainties in Japan are crumbling.
Aida says the 1955 system - meaning the post-war political and economic settlement that laid the foundations for the Japanese miracle - wasn't great, "but it seemed secure to many Japanese. There was a dependency there for many, so it is not entirely bad that people now sense this system is broken and can't continue forever".
One of the largest pieces at the Mori show, the five-metre-high features hundreds of tweets pasted in the shape of a ruined Fukushima reactor building. Neither exclusively pro- nor anti-nuclear, the tweets embrace and amplify the confusion felt by millions of Japanese.
Typically, Aida will not be pinned down on his own position, only conceding that he has been "overwhelmed" by the flood of information and argument that followed Fukushima, and that is partly an expression of "powerlessness".
"So many Japanese are talking about the radiation and I suppose I've been caught up in that," he muses, again struggling for words. "There are times when we can't take our eyes off what has been happening and I thought I should just show this situation as it is" - rather than judge it.
Like so many of his pieces, Aida's is almost a work of social conscience, but one that refuses to take clear sides. It is, perhaps, the embodiment of his artistic philosophy: embrace the chaos, there's plenty more to come.
"Aida Makoto: Monument for Nothing"
