"As I get older, the age difference gets wider, and yet the almost magnetic attraction to these girls gets stronger and stronger." But, the artist emphasizes, it's not a romantic interest.
"At the age of fourteen, I became obsessed with the magical quality young girls have," he says. And he strives the make the viewer uncomfortable: Whether it be videoing himself masturbating in front of a large banner that reads "beautiful little girl," dressing up as Osama bin Laden for a Saturday Night Live-esque video project, or painting the firebombing of New York by Japanese airplanes. His themes include sexuality, war, and national identity. They drew inspiration from this–using the language of manga and anime to convey their message.Īida is iconoclastic and uncompromising, his work varied and provocative.
They experienced the rapid ascent of the Japanese economy during the heady 1980s, and came of age surrounded by pop culture. These artists had grown up after the war, while the process of rebuilding Japan was in full swing. A former Research Associate of the Harvard Reischauer Institute, she has co-edited Art and War in Japan and its Empire 1931-1960 (Brill, 2012), and is completing a monograph on the modern Franco-Japanese artist, Foujita Tsuguharu (1886-1968).Makoto Aida was one of Japan's enfant terribles, along with Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara, that took the international art scene by storm in the 1990s. Former Chair of the Department of Art and Professor of Art History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Professor McDonald ’s research and teaching interests have shifted to modern and contemporary Japanese art and the complex relationship between art and war. This paper explores the violent imagery of three major artists of the Heisei era – Takashi Murakami, Makoto Aida, and Tabaimo, whose distinct artistic strategies push the boundaries of contemporary high art toward horror, violence, and the grotesque.Īs members of a generation born well after the end of the Pacific War into an affluent, peaceful, and technologically advanced global Japanese society, they enjoyed a youth and adolescence that granted unimpeded access to the rich, imaginative visual world of fantasy in television, anime, manga, and video games – a world where apocalypse and dystopia flourish – a world that I argue eerily recalls and bears comparison with the pre-war taste for erotic grotesque nonsense - critical concepts already explored in depth by Mark Driscoll and the late Miriam Silverberg.Īya Louisa McDonald received her PhD at Stanford University having written her dissertation on Heian painting: Onna-e and Otoko-e and their relation to Chinese Painting. The explosive violence and themes of mayhem that runs amok in Japanese film, anime, video games, and manga, appear equally and frequently in Japanese contemporary art. Room 301, 3F, Building 10, Sophia Universityĭystopia, galactic battles, and technological nightmares have dominated the popularĬulture of the Heisei Era (1989-2019) contributing to what has become a widespread international pop-cultural phenomenon. Takashi Murakami, Makoto Aida, and Tabaimo - the Unholy Trinity of Horror and Violence in the Heisei Era
Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture Lecture Series 2019
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