In the 1990s, Makoto Aida entered the art world together with Yoshitomo Nara, Takashi Murakami and others, but he was slightly younger. This group of artists grew up in the era of Japan's post-war reconstruction and economic boom, and were deeply influenced by popular culture such as animation. New Yorkers' impression of him mainly comes from a group exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art in 2003. At that time, Makoto Aida submitted a very provocative work - a picture of a group of Japanese fighter jets from the World War II era bombing the skyscrapers of Manhattan along a figure-eight route. Less than two years after the 9/11 incident, one can imagine how Americans feel about this painting.
His "A High School Student Who Commits Seppuku" has been hotly discussed in the American media recently. This is a print printed on film with acrylic raw materials. In the center of the picture is a female middle school student in school uniform, holding a samurai sword high, ready to kill, just like the girl killer played by Chiaki Kuriyama in "Kill Bill". Behind her, an arc of rainbow spurted out of the blood mist. Surrounded by several girls of similar age, some had a caesarean section or committed suicide, winking coquettishly. The girl in the center of the picture is the wrong person who helped them behead and die.
At first I thought this was a kind of camp style as Susan Sontag said, and at the same time it expressed a playful attitude towards traditional bushido. But then I read an introduction from Makoto Aida, saying that in the 1990s, he saw a group of wandering female middle school students squatting on the ground in the Shibuya Station area of ??Tokyo, as if committing collective suicide, and he was inspired. He wanted to use the images of these girls as a metaphor for Japan's cultural suicide in the era of globalization. Not long after the economic bubble burst at that time, the suicide rate in Japan increased sharply. That was also the period when the "kogal" subculture was popular. Many young women wore short student skirts, with sideways smiles, sagging knitted leggings fixed on their calves with special sock glue, and Pikachu or Hello Kitty hanging on their schoolbags. doll. In short, just like in Rumiko Takahashi's comic books, she is cute and very "kawaii".
The "kawaii" image painted by Aida is more like the imagination of an otaku who is a lolicon. The painter told a reporter that he continued to wet his bed until he was in high school, the age when he became obsessed with the girls around him. This made him feel frustrated. He later became a bad boy in the art world, perhaps because of this frustration. He often made shocking and sensational moves, including dressing up as Bin Laden in performance art and piling up sake bottles in front of him.
Through the recurring virtual violence and death in Aida Makoto's works, it is not difficult to imagine that some people in Japan are still struggling with the shame of defeat and the discomfort caused by Western technological civilization.