Sunday People (baby baby)
May. 21st, 2007 03:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusWe begin our Sunday full of Sunday People with a trip to Sangenjaya, where artist Yukiko Sawabe wants to show me her contribution to the Kappan Saisei Ten (Letterpress Printing Revive) exhibition. In fact it's our contribution, because Yukiko has taken a song we made together back in 2005, when she came to Berlin to work on a project about the fairy tale Allerleirauh, 
and turned it into a homage to typographer Claude Garamond. You can hear our original song here.
Yukiko then joins us on a trek up to Ueno Park, where we catch the opening of the Makoto Aida and Akira Yamaguchi two-man retrospective The Seasons in Art. Despite the deceptively bland title, this show by the two heavyweights of the Kotatsu School is dynamite, full of sex (Aida's massive canvas of naked girls in a huge blender really shouldn't be sexy, but close up it is), dark humour (a toothless Japanese farmer pulls Louis Vuitton handbags out of a field where they're growing like turnips, exclaiming "Another bumper harvest!") and violence (Aida's "Picture of an Air Raid on New York City (War Picture Returns)" shows New York in flames after being attacked by kamikaze stukas).
Since Aida also made a video (clips are included in the show) of himself as a sake-fuzzy Bin Laden, I asked his gallerist Mizuma whether the painting of New York in flames was a response to the comparisons often made between 9/11 and Pearl Harbour, the Saudi terrorists and the kamikaze. Mizuma pointed out to me that Aida made this image in 1996. His first thought, when 9/11 happened, was that Aida had anticipated it. He told me to look at the flames in the painting -- they're painted in the style of the flames in traditional Buddhist images of hell. This, then, is an image of hell.
After a walk through the wooden streets and graveyards of Yanaka, we head to Shibuya to meet with fashion artist Fumiko Imano and photographer Kawashima Kotori. Fumiko is about to take a flat in Yokohama (since returning from Paris she's been living with her family in the sticks) but for the time being she's staying with Zoren Gold and Minoru in their house on top of the hill in Naka-Meguro. Kawashima, a bit like Gold, tends to work with just one model. He's recently published a photobook -- phonebook thick, the book contains hundreds of colour photos all of the same girl -- called Baby Baby. She looks about 12 on the cover, but turns out to be in her late 20s.
and turned it into a homage to typographer Claude Garamond. You can hear our original song here.Yukiko then joins us on a trek up to Ueno Park, where we catch the opening of the Makoto Aida and Akira Yamaguchi two-man retrospective The Seasons in Art. Despite the deceptively bland title, this show by the two heavyweights of the Kotatsu School is dynamite, full of sex (Aida's massive canvas of naked girls in a huge blender really shouldn't be sexy, but close up it is), dark humour (a toothless Japanese farmer pulls Louis Vuitton handbags out of a field where they're growing like turnips, exclaiming "Another bumper harvest!") and violence (Aida's "Picture of an Air Raid on New York City (War Picture Returns)" shows New York in flames after being attacked by kamikaze stukas).
Since Aida also made a video (clips are included in the show) of himself as a sake-fuzzy Bin Laden, I asked his gallerist Mizuma whether the painting of New York in flames was a response to the comparisons often made between 9/11 and Pearl Harbour, the Saudi terrorists and the kamikaze. Mizuma pointed out to me that Aida made this image in 1996. His first thought, when 9/11 happened, was that Aida had anticipated it. He told me to look at the flames in the painting -- they're painted in the style of the flames in traditional Buddhist images of hell. This, then, is an image of hell.
After a walk through the wooden streets and graveyards of Yanaka, we head to Shibuya to meet with fashion artist Fumiko Imano and photographer Kawashima Kotori. Fumiko is about to take a flat in Yokohama (since returning from Paris she's been living with her family in the sticks) but for the time being she's staying with Zoren Gold and Minoru in their house on top of the hill in Naka-Meguro. Kawashima, a bit like Gold, tends to work with just one model. He's recently published a photobook -- phonebook thick, the book contains hundreds of colour photos all of the same girl -- called Baby Baby. She looks about 12 on the cover, but turns out to be in her late 20s.