Horrors of the Simian Brain

Korean Comfort Women: Japanese Meat Locker
Oil on Canvas
2020

The series and the paintings are a meditation into human suffering. It’s an investigation into our specieist angst borne of the Ape with the largest brain. The seeming dichotomy of the Ape versus the Essence of being a sentient consciousness is but a delusion. We are singularly both, the Ape and Essence in our souls.

The paintings are also altars of proxy, to experience unimaginable pain under extreme and extraordinary conditions in order to exorcise our own. They are also devices of awakening from the drone of modern cultural zeitgeist of post-modern identity politics and intellectual myopia within tribal echo-chambers. The paintings are desired to act as koans on the individual consciousness.

First, it’s a pushback against the indoctrination by the leftist post-modern feminist professors who love to preach the idea that only the white colonial patriarchy is capable of committing atrocities. By doing this, the professors unwittingly inflate the mystique and power of the white male; and minimizes the horrors experienced by the victims at the hands of other imperial colonial powers throughout human history. In trying to deliver a message of unity against their arch enemy, the white male patriarchy, the liberal academics are shaping narratives that are incomplete and misshapen.

Secondly, racism was and is rampant within the Mongoloid race. The racist rhetoric practiced by Imperial Japan prior to their invasion of China and to the annexation of Korea has an equal only with Nazi Germany. Even today, large swathes of the Japanese population believe that they are superior to other Mongoloid races and deride the “others” as sub-human. The horrors of the simian brain are not limited to the white male patriarchy. The evils of the human condition are not relegated to just the colonial Western Europeans.

Thirdly, my paintings aren’t about the Japanese. It’s a tribute to the victims and a way to memorialize their indignant horrors. It’s a meditation on suffering. It’s akin to the portrayals of the Passion Play or the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. In looking at the paintings, you are not to fixate on the Roman soldiers. It’s about the suffering of Christ. It’s not about the Japanese soldiers. It’s about the suffering of the victimized women because their souls are trapped in flesh that is raped and mutilated in every way, everyday, in every war and everywhere.

Fourthly, the paintings, especially Korean Comfort Women: Japanese Meat Locker is a statement on colonialism and its effects on the victimized peoples. It is an extrapolation on the essence of the rape, torture, exploitation, enslavement and cannibalization that is akin to colonialism.

Lastly, the works and their graphic depictions are meant to evoke a meta state of mind as it reflects on the matter of art itself. It is meant to pose the question, “What possible value could our art be when our specie is so beastly?”

See more at @juno_moon_the_painter or junomoon.art