The Wanted
Artists Group was established in 1998 to create collaborative works of art which were conceived as an answer to the bizarre signs and posters created by the Japanese police in an effort to capture members of the religion Aum Shinrikyo. Three members of this group are still wanted in Japan to stand trial for their suspected connection with poison gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in March of 1995.
The work began as a photography project that was dedicated to documenting this police art across the entire country. Some of these works include life sized photographic reproductions attached to cardboard and dressed in real clothing. Other streets or subway stations display larger than life posters of the suspects' faces, or even flags or paper lanterns printed with the same images. In recent years it has been difficult to go to almost any public place in Japan without seeing this kind of display featuring the faces of some of Japan's most wanted.
The request to notify
the authorities immediately if one catches a glimpse of one
of these suspects is often packaged with pleas to be
suspicious of your neighbors. That strange guy who
lives in your apartment who always keeps his curtains closed
is probably a terrorist making bombs. As we walk down
the street with our children, there could be an underground
hideout full of bomb building terrorists directly below our
feet.
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Work together and be suspicious of those who aren't quite right. Help the police weed out the enemies of our country. This is practically a direct translation of a great deal of posters issued by the Japanese police, complete with cartoon illustrations of the images just described. In these cartoons, the terrorist is represented as wearing a white helmet, sunglasses, and a white handkerchief over his mouth and nose, and referred to as "this type of person". |
In Japan you have only to walk the streets of most any town to be inundated with images that express this message, a message most recently fueled by a national agenda to destroy Aum Shinrikyo. The ironic side effect of creating an enemy with Aum is that the police have literally created the enemy--created them with pieces of wood and cardboard. |
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The saga of
the State vs. Aum is the makings of a political
science fiction novel, yet the novel could never be
as strange as the reality on the streets of
Japan. Our photos of these signs and our
paintings about them have an eerie story to tell to
future generations. It is a story which will
not be recorded in history, and does not appear in
the news reports about Aum. The sad story
that where once we feared poison gas, now we live
in fear of cardboard. |
About the
Art
There are 16 works
in this collection. The Wanted Artist Group is a group
of three artists and two guest artists. The work
involved a system of rules in which each artist was
allowed to contribute freely to each work, building the
images as they pleased. When the work was passed to a
second or third artist, the new artist would modify the work
however they wanted. Each work would continue to
see sometimes radical changes before a consensus would be
reached that the work was "finished". It was
impossible for any one artist to predict what any given work
would finally look like. The process was entirely
collaborative and improvisational.
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The
Art
E-mail the Wanted Artists Group
More
Photos of
Aum
Wanted Posters and Signs
Site created March
8, 2000.
Last Updated June
14, 2001.
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