This year, the contemporary artist/provocateur Makoto Aida took inspiration from a 19th-century Kuniyoshi Utagawa woodblock print in which the 10th-century princess and witch, Takiyasha, summoned a skeletal ghost to menace the emperor¡¯s official mystic Oya no Taro Mitsukuni.
Aida¡¯s massive installation, ¡°Monument for Nothing V¡± (2019), is a starving skeletal specter in bedraggled World War II military uniform, representing the war dead. An outstretched hand points to and touches the tip the National Diet building, modeled after a funerary headstone, apportioning contemporary complicity. The installation is one of four commissioned to dovetail with the historical sections comprising ¡°Heroes and People in the Japanese Contemporary Art,¡± at the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art.
As the museum¡¯s final Heisei Era (1989-2019) exhibition, this ambitious and somewhat provocative show looks back on both the Showa and Heisei (1926-2019) eras. It considers the socio-political roles art played in the midst of the past 90 or so years through five themed sections: group action, strange figures, places of significance, war, and everyday life.
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