Ash Gray

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Makoto Aida's Ash Color Mountains are really interesting, especially viewed up close for the fine print kind of experience. You'd probably even notice that not all the dead, gray-suited men are Japanese.

See that mountain in the front?

I call it 'Mt. Olympus'. And I'm guessing it's about 40,000 pairs of feet high.

A little confused? You know what he is about, don't you?

"There's something horribly wrong at the top of Olympus."

"They are going backwards and they are not moving quickly enough in closing loss-making businesses, nothing's allowed to fail in Japan. They are not innovating, they treat half their workforce, women, in a way which is to me extremely chauvinistic, never mind women in senior positions in a boardroom, you find very few women at middle management level," he said, describing the outlook for Japan's corporate world as pretty bleak.

Well, what do people think of that other half of the workforce? This fellow apparently thinks Japan opening up to immigrants is the only way. 

Doomed!

So, what about those women? Mmm...

But really... what was the artist thinking? It's almost as if he hates cute in a loving way.

Even though he's a reject, he's still got some kind of fear of mature women. Which he tries to explain.

From the video above:

Q: Can you describe some themes in your work, such as "bishoujo"(young, beautiful girls)?

Aida: Girls... there are certainly many girls. If I respond in an earnest manner, I believe there is an abundance of problematic points in the current generation of Japanese society and Japanese mentality...  Yes...after all... I am not motivated from within to draw mature woman... The reason I do not want to draw mature woman is strange....

As he explains, he mentions Japan losing the war and there being a lack of fatherly figures. Which kind of confuses me as Aida was born in the 60's.  He goes on to talk about how feminine Japan has become.

At one point in the interview (5:25), he mentions a "denial of masculinity"... yet there's the obsession with immature women.

How can Japan have become feminine when women rank so low? Maybe they are not low enough? 

There's a story that goes something like this:

In the old days... the real old days, a sun goddess was a bit upset when at least one of her maidens was impaled by something, thanks to her uber-destructive brother. So, she shuts herself in a cave and everything begins to die. Kind of like now.

So, there's a big party, people get drunk (and noisy). Then someone flashes her genitalia.

She decides to come back and everything gets better. 

Maybe that's what this place needs. A little of what they fear the most:

The Great Wall 

All models are over 18. Maybe that's the problem, what makes it 'obscene' while this isn't.

There is irony in what a person like Michael tells everyone that he sees, what it is  was like from his perspective up at the top, he gets ejected from heaven.

Put your trust in them

So they can put this in you

Unless you prefer to do this

 WARNING: HUAD can be fatal.

 Then the Economist posts something like this:

Some in Japan wonder why Mori, a company with annual sales of $2 billion and that builds skyscrapers for the uptown elite, should promote such a downtown hellraiser as Mr Aida or indeed those other iconoclastic Asian artists, China’s Ai Weiwei and South Korea’s Lee Bul. That it does is just another of the incongruities of this exhibition. 

Aren't elite attitudes a major part of the problem here?

Maybe more people should try to become the greatest artist in the world, starting at the top, like the B-Boy of J-art.

Whatever...

(unedited)