AI MAKITA

2021

Ai Makita was born in Chiba, Japan, and currently lives and works in Tokyo. She received her B.A. from Tsukuba University, Japan, and her M.A. in Art and Education from Tokyo National University of Arts. Over the last decade, her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in Japan and New York. 

Makita was a recipient of the eighteenth Taro Okamoto Award for Contemporary Art in 2015, and was awarded a fellowship grant from Pola Art Foundation in 2017. She has participated in the Varda Artists Residency Program in Sausalito and Residency Unlimited in New York.

Makita’s work is the subject of a solo exhibition, Tectonic Shifts, at The Something Machine in Bellport, NY, on view June 11 through July 10, 2022. The work in the exhibition was created as a landscape painting inspired by the image of Tsunami in Japan, and the title, Tectonic Shifts, as the name implies, refers to crustal movement.

In 2021, Makita presented solo exhibitions at mh PROJECT nyc in New York and haku in Kyoto, Japan.

“Where is the border between “artificial” and “natural”?

I began to contemplate the relationship between human technology and the sublime by the trigger of disastrous nuclear incidents of 3.11. Human beings have not just lived following the natural cycle, we have been trying to strengthen and expand our limited life by armoring ourselves with technologiesI have attempted to represent organic shape by combining and processing inorganic motifs such as metal and plastic. My expression is of the moment when an inorganic object has an awakening, and depict the shape as “something,” which exists between biotic and abiotic realm in abstract and realistic ways of painting. The technology which expands our physical ability such as A.I. has become a part of our life(body) more naturally, whether physically or morally.

But we can’t escape from the uncanny and discomfort of our actual body becoming data-like and being controlled by the machines.

My artwork aims to create a “Binary-Distortion,” which stimulates the viewers to feel going back and forth between life and non-life, digital image and physical space, two-dimension and three-dimension. The detailed technique, in my art, adds physical-realism, which assumes a role as a mediator for communicating the two polar ends.

The boundary of “artificiality” and “nature” is updated by the shift of our current cognition, but the terror of human technological catastrophe inspires me to strive to develop my imagination.”

- Ai Makita

“Describing the creative process, I take photos of metallic materials at first, then I create one digital image by processing the photos and patching them together using Photoshop. After that, I transfer the image onto a physical canvas, and finally, I finish my artwork with oil paint. When I create a digital image on Photoshop, I usually use twenty to thirty photos for a final image.

I not only simply collage the photos, but also process them by changing shapes and angles and colors. I spend about one month on each image, working nearly twelve hours a day on the image. After maybe a month I have an image that I can transfer to canvas and work on with oil paint.