Monument For Nothing

Makoto Aida's Monument for Nothing gathers two decades of a practice built on refusing to settle into one style, medium, or position.

Published by Graphic-sha in 2007 to accompany a survey of Aida's work, the 245-page volume runs text in Japanese and English and includes a chronology alongside an introductory essay by curator Gabriel Ritter, "True Colors." It moves across the paintings, installations, video, and drawing that make up Aida's output, work that has taken on Japanese nationalism, war memory, pornography, and the art world's own conventions, often within a single piece. The book follows no single thread through this range; instead it lays out the contradictions side by side, letting a nationalist history painting sit near a cartoonish self-portrait.

Aida trained at Tokyo University of the Arts and has remained one of Japan's most argued-over artists since the 1990s, as comfortable provoking with dark satire as painting in a deliberately classical, nihonga-derived style.