MAKOTO AIDA
Born 1965 in Niigata, Japan. Lives and works in Chiba, Japan.
Makoto Aida Calligraphy School, 2007, aluminium sheet, marking sheet, 280 x 280 cm unframed. Courtesy the artist and Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo. Copyright © AIDA Makoto. Photograph: Keizo Kioku. The presentation of this work was made possible with assistance from Ishibashi Foundation.
Makoto Aida is known for provocative paintings and drawings that subvert popular Japanese visual culture with their complex political undertones. Aida’s work is based in the raw badlands of parody, fear and absurdity in contemporary life. Drawing from the long history and traditions of painting and printmaking in Japan, he takes an askew angle on the darker side of the national consciousness. Aida studied at Tokyo University of the Arts. As a younger man, he held firm beliefs about western hegemony and resolved not to learn English, both because he wasn’t very good at it and because it represented American supremacy. However, Aida is not a nationalist – in fact, the reverse; he takes a critical and probing approach to the psyche of Japan. His works touch on subjects of great social sensitivity such as terrorism, the ever-present submissive ‘cute culture’ of Japan, and even paedophilia, yet with a conscious, critical and provocative use of irony. In the painting Imagine (2005), he places the viewer in a pilot’s seat headed straight for the plane’s target – the twin towers of the World Trade Center. He has also produced, in the form of traditional six-panel folding screens, a wide panorama of Japanese Zero fighter planes flying over an enflamed New York City, in a contemporary take on the propaganda paintings produced during the Second World War that glorified the Imperial Japanese Army. In works such as these he compares one form of imperialism with another.
Aida makes works that feed on the erotic subculture of Japanese manga using its language and conventions to make a serious point. He deals with taboos in his own country and beyond, going for the cultural jugular in an intelligent and somewhat odd, naive way. He is able to produce populist works done in an almost amateurish fashion, as well as works done in the traditional Nihonga style showing the highest of technical proficiency. Aida is critical of traditional art for its lack of content and blind allegiance to the rules that govern it, mixing up western with traditional styles – sometimes in the same painting, sometimes in separate works. Motifs in his paintings and videos range from traditional calligraphy to piles of dead, grey-suited, salarymen, to a parody video of Osama Bin Laden hiding in rural Japan. Aida’s videos, installations, paintings and manga books are marked by a dark cynicism about the psycho-sexual underbelly of Japanese male culture. His video, I-DE-A (2005), shows the artist in an onanistic stance in front of pink Japanese characters spelling out the words ‘beautiful little girl’. Harakiri School Girls (1999) – a play on the famous Shibuya school girls from the eponymous area of Tokyo – is representative of Aida’s portrayal of young females. In other works, such as DOG (Typhoon) (2008), he depicts doomed submissive amputees, clad in dog collars who embrace degradation and oppression through a perverted form of ‘cuteness’. In such shocking works, Aida aims to force the viewer to reflect on dominating stereotypes and the cruel misogyny of certain areas of the society that surrounds him and of which he himself is a part.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2008 ‘I’m IWAKI of Mizuma Art Gallery!!’, Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo, Japan 2006 ‘Picture of Mountain Stream and Others’, Andrew Roth Inc., New York, USA
2005 ‘Drink SAKE Alone’, Lisa Dent Gallery, San Francisco, USA 2005 ‘Donki-Hote’, Man in the Holocene at IBID Projects, London, UK
2001 ‘Edible Artificial Girls, Mi-Mi Chan’, Murata & Friends, Berlin, Germany
Selected Group Exhibitions
2009 ‘Wallworks’, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, USA
2008 ‘Laughing in a Foreign Language’, Hayward Gallery, London, UK
2006 ‘Belief’, 1st Singapore Biennale, Singapore
2003 ‘The American Effect – Global Perspectives on the United States 1990–2003’, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA
2002 ‘Coloriage’, Foundation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, France
Selected Bibliography
David Elliott, ‘Essay by David Elliott’, Tokyo Visualist, D.D. WAVE Co., Ltd, Tokyo, 2010, p. 29
Andrew Maerkle, ‘Makoto Aida, No More War; Save Water; Don’t Pollute the Sea’, ArtAsiaPacific, no. 59, New York, 2002, pp. 132–41
Midori Matsui, ‘The Place of Marginal Positionality: Legacies of Japanese Anti-Modernity’, Consuming Bodies – Sex and Contemporary Japanese Art, Reaktion Books, London, 2002, pp. 142–65
Roger McDonald, ‘Aida Makoto’, International Triennale of Contemporary Art Yokohama 2001, exhibition catalogue, Organizing Committee for Yokohama Triennale, 2001, pp. 148–49
Gabriel Ritter, ‘True Colours’, Monument For Nothing, Graphic-Sha Publishing Co., Ltd, Tokyo, 2007, pp. 6–7