Great Dazzle War, 2017

Hong Kong 2018
Great Dazzle War

Mujin-to Production

Work on Paper
woodcut print (panel, Japanese paper, oil ink)
1/1
182.5 x 362.0 x 4.0 (厘米)
71.9 x 142.5 x 1.6 (吋)
It is a battle-piece depicting a confrontation between modern and rational society which controls modern conveniences such as light and fire, and dark and cold irrational world where monsters exist. On the right, sorcerer Jiraiya, a fictional hero from the novels in the Edo period, attacks and dazzles businessmen with cold slack-off gas his minion toad blows, and the businessmen defend the attack with a calculator, a pension book and a bankbook as a shield. Middle school students, who are future hardworking businessmen standby on a time schedule and try to repel temptation from the darkness with a floodlight on the rooftop after school. When I was in the middle school, I didn’t fit into school and spent most of my time at home reading and daydreaming. I had a dream to be an educated idler like Charles Baudelaire. Such freakish desire so-called ‘Chuunibyou’ (8th grade syndrome) is reflected in the background of this work. A decadent dream of unhealthily and immorally not engaging to work and living for beauty and art like Baudelaire is a defiance against the Japanese education policy of good health and hard work. It is a kind of downfall from a light side to a dark side. Straying from the norms of the society and living in a fantasy world. I know it is basically impossible to do so through the intellect of grownups, but the primary conflict which has arisen during puberty is still struggling inside me. It is a striped-pattern-like conflict that white of the light and black of the dark makes, like the dazzle camouflage developed during the WWI, which had a mixture of scientific effect and artist’s ego in the pattern. Sachiko Kazama, 2017