Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Makoto Aida: My Ken Ten (short version)

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Makoto Aida: My Ken Ten (short version)

by John McGee

Makoto Aida, Niigata Shinkansen and Japan mo from the "Minna to Issho"
series, both 2002

The hanging scroll looks like a typical, if simple, Japanese-style landscape painting—a boatman on a river in the foreground, mountains behind. This 1987 work by bad boy artist Makoto Aida, however, has no long poetic inscription at the top. Instead, Aida wrote just two kanji—hetta (unskilled). Aida the Ironic, he knows all too well that he’s good at two things above all else: painting and being a wise-ass. 

Aida (b. 1965) emerged in the 1990s with sarcastic work that weds gold-leafed tradition with manga, Japanese past with Shibuya present. Schoolgirls in sailor uniforms commit ritual seppuku. WWII Zeros fly in a figure eight pattern while firebombing Manhattan. Flamboyant to the point of sensationalism, Aida keeps things under control with his highly refined technique. Even his cockroaches and turds floating in outer space don’t seem vulgar. In fact, such images are usually the striking points in his visual debates about where Japan is now and how it got here. 

Aida’s show “My Ken Ten” at Mizuma Art Gallery in Naka-Meguro seems to taunt Japan’s disgraced archeological community (in 2000, a prominent archeologist was found planting artifacts in his digs, raising doubts about years of discoveries). A video catches Aida uncovering giant unko (shit) from fictitious Jomon period dinosaurs in the mountains of Aomori Prefecture. Actual pieces of his “find” plus a new painting of a giant salamander and a neon sign spelling out korosu (kill) are also on display. 

This exhibition was held Nov-Dec 2003 at Mizuma Art Gallery in Naka-Meguro, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

©2006-2008 John McGee. All Rights Reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission.