Makoto Aida (born 1965, Japan)

The Video from a Man Calling Himself Bin Laden Staying in Japan, 2005

Single channel video, sound, 8 minutes, 14 seconds

Asia Society, New York: Promised Gift of Harold and Ruth Newman.

A prominent artist in contemporary Japanese art since the 1990s, Makoto Aida has dealt with subjects considered taboo for many Japanese. Among the recurring themes in his oeuvre is war and nationalism. In this video shot in an amateurish style, not unlike videos taken by terrorists and sent to foreign media to announce their destructive acts, the artist impersonates the world’s most wanted terrorist in a hypothetical situation—hiding in Japan. He becomes a lazy, sake-drinking old man who, in a drunken stupor, tells the viewer that he has quit being a terrorist and to stop looking for him. The work treads a moral tightrope by referencing the politically charged figure and at the same time becomes a poignant satire of the pacifist and insular political environment of Japan.

Cao Fei (born 1978, China)

Rabid Dogs, 2002

Single channel video, sound, 8 minutes

Asia Society, New York: Promised Gift of Harold and Ruth Newman.

Cao Fei, one of the most acclaimed female Chinese artists of the post-Tiananmen generation, works in photography, video, film, and more recently, in the virtual realm of Second Life. Throughout her experimentations in varying media, she consistently questions human nature—how we all tend to think and act—as we live in the global society. In Rabid Dogs, Cao’s video camera aims at the growing consumerism in today’s China. People dressed in Burberry’s tartan plaid roam around on all fours in a modern office setting, their faces painted like dogs, in a style evoking Chinese opera face painting. Their seemingly rabid consumerism renders them unrecognizable as human beings, challenging the viewer’s understanding of human nature.

Lin Yilin (born 1964, China)

Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road, 1995

Single channel video, sound, 36 minutes, 45 seconds

Asia Society, New York: Promised Gift of Harold and Ruth Newman.

Since the mid 1980s, Lin Yilin has been at the center of China’s avant-garde art movement. In 1990, along with Chen Shaoxiong and Liang Juhui, Lin was a founding member of Big Tail Elephant Group, a progressive performance and installation art group based in Guangzhou, China, which was later joined by Xu Tan. He frequently uses the motif of a brick wall to address the issue of rapid urbanization, and the danger and tension that result from it. Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road is a video recording of a performance by Lin that highlights the futile, and quite dangerous, act of moving a wall, brick by brick, across a highly trafficked main street in Guangzhou. Moving at a snail’s pace, the process took hours to complete and seems to be in sharp contrast with the rapid building construction and demolition taking place around him.

Motohiko Odani (born 1972, Japan)

Rompers, 2003

Single channel video, sound, 2 minutes, 52 seconds

Music by Pirami

Asia Society, New York: Promised Gift of Harold and Ruth Newman.

Motohiko Odani has been celebrated for his meticulously crafted objects and visions of utopia and dystopia since the late 1990s. A main theme underlying his sculpture, photography, and video work is mutation of humans and animals. In his celluloid-colored video Rompers, a computer-graphic-enhanced mutant girl sings, idyllically, while eerie insects crawl around her. She is indifferent to them and seems to accept that she is becoming something other than herself. The work comments on the mutation of nature in an age of bioengineering while appropriating the innocent setting of the children’s TV program, Romper Room that originally aired in the United States in the 1950s. On the Japanese version that was shown during the late 1960s and the 1970s, toy bees and cute animals frolicked with children.

Patty Chang (born 1972, United States)

Melons (At a Loss), 1998

Single channel video, sound, 3 minutes, 44 seconds

Asia Society, New York: Promised Gift of Harold and Ruth Newman.

Since her sensational appearance on the New York art scene in the late 1990s with performance art and performance-based video works, Patty Chang has continually explored the limits of our physical and psychological comfort zone. In this video, Melon (At a Loss), facing the camera head on, Chang narrates a story of a special porcelain plate made in honor of her aunt who had died. But the storytelling becomes less an act of remembering her dead relative and increasingly irrelevant in the course of the video. Using a cantaloupe as a prop that is shaped like one of her own breasts, Chang performs a bizarre mutilation as she slices and eats the fruit in a self-cannibalistic act. Standing with a ceramic plate placed on top of her head, the artist personifies the precarious balance between mind and body.