Taste Test

Masakatsu Sashie’s Junk Planets

Japanese artist Masakatsu Sashie’s paintings are a fantastically eerie reaction to today’s technological clusterfuck. Televisions, radios, vending machines, smokestacks, car parts, and other 21st century detritus are all smashed together and crushed into junkspheres that float above ruined cityscapes in dismal weather. Each sphere creates a number of possible narratives. Are these floating smog-spewing orbs responsible for the destruction of the metropolis, or are they a recycled Phoenix, emerging out of the ruins of a dead civilization? There is a disconcerting absence of human figures or living creatures of any kind in the city-scape. Oddly enough, these dismal post-human worlds still manage to exude some kind of cuteness. Sashie’s creations borrow from the Otaku culture of video games, toys, and anime, and combine them with less saturated, dustier Western visions like The Road Warrior or Harlan Ellison’s A Boy And His Dog. I’d like to see one of these things battling Ego, the Living Planet.

Go to Masakatsu Sashie’s Web Gallery

Tags: Japan, painting