One of Japan’s best-known contemporary artists is locked in a fight with a public museum over claims it has threatened to pull the plug on works critical of the conservative government.
Makoto Aida said the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo told him to yank the pieces from an exhibit that started last week because they were “not suitable” for children, but the museum countered that it just asked him to “modify” his creations.
“I was told that the works were not appropriate and that they wanted me to remove them,” Aida said at the museum this week.
Photo: AFP
He added that the demand followed a complaint from a visitor and at the request of the Tokyo City Government.
One piece, a video installation, appears to mock Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose popularity has dived as parliament debates controversial legislation aimed at expanding the scope of Japan’s military, which is currently limited to a narrowly defensive role.
The legislation, which Abe says is necessary to counter rising regional tensions, is controversial in pacifist Japan and has sparked rare protests.
Aida’s video depicts the artist pretending to be Abe making a speech in broken English, while a large calligraphy mildly mocking the education ministry hangs nearby.
Aida said the calligraphy work was meant to be humorous, “not political.”
The video — in which he says he is playing the role of “a man calling himself Japan’s prime minister” — offers a “sincere apology” to people in China, the Koreas and other Asian countries that suffered from Japan’s imperial expansion in the first half of the 20th century.
Abe has been accused by some of taking a revisionist view on Japan’s warring past, framing the country as more victim than aggressor.
“We began imitating other powerful countries, we colonized those weaker nations surrounding us and we began wars of aggression,” the artist says in the video transcript.
“There were a great many people whom we insulted, and we wounded — and we killed... I am sorry,” the artist says.
A museum spokeswoman said Aida was asked to “modify” his works for the child-focused exhibit, without elaborating.
“We asked him if he could make them more approachable to children,” she said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema