Makoto Aida

Makoto Aida

Born in 1965 in Niigata Prefecture. He lives in Tokyo.

Aida's artwork exaggerates tastes that have come to define Japanese culture.
"Harakiri School Girls"(2007) depicts a group of high school girls performing ritual suicide by self-disembowelment. In the 1990s when this painting was produced, it became fashionable among some Japanese high school girls to dye their hair brown, wear baggy white socks, and darken their faces. Although there was a tendency to criticize this fashion as symptomatic of a breakdown in morals, some observers saw it as an example of defiant self-expression in the face of Western values that deem white beautiful and the selfish demands of Japanese males who seek submissiveness.
"Aichan-BONSAI" (2008) features a strange-looking bonsai tree with countless manga-like female heads. In bonsai, trees that normally grow big are trained over time to assume predetermined ideal shapes, but kept small their entire lives. Aida detects a perverse kind of love in the art of bonsai, which is also regarded as a symbol of Japanese culture, and exaggerates it in this work.