Not long ago, the indie game “Contempt”, which has been held back for 8 years, was announced for sale. The developer finally managed to meet the game and players before the launch of the similarly fateful Russian game “Atomic Heart”. The invisible competition of “who is the dog who will be released first” was defeated.
When it comes to “Contempt”, we have to talk about its art style: it integrates Giger-style biomechanics, and turns the vague art style into the industrial system of a flesh factory. No matter who you are, you have to be addicted to the shocking images, and it is even better if you can see the source of its inspiration.
And I was the lucky one—on Christmas Eve, Beijing Art Paradise 798, the Ullens Center for the Arts held “Giger and Sorayama: Tomorrow is Approaching” the first two-person exhibition in China. I was invited to watch it and feel it for myself. A grim retro future.
Giger and Kongshanji, the artistic styles of the two painters can be said to be completely different. Giger is the creator of biomechanical wind and the father of aliens, while Kongshanji is often called an erotic illustrator.
The works look very different, and the life backgrounds of the two of them are also a little plain, so it is difficult to find any special entries for “superstar standard”. The film staff of “Alien” once expressed emotion that everything about the Swiss painter Giger who participated in the art design seemed so ordinary, “He has not been abused, and he has no mental problems.” Such creations are only possible because of my sensitivity to nightmares and horrors.
Giger has a solid track record in business. The inspiration for the image of “Alien” came from his art album “Necronomicon” published in 1976 – Giger was once obsessed with the Cthulhu gods described by the master of love crafts, so he set his own painting album full of strange creatures. the name. He had drawn the perfect creature with long head, scorpion tail, full of unspeakable sexual hints very early on.
Later, he was hired as the designer of “Alien” as a matter of course, and designed the alien creature and the entire ecological chain for the movie. The restored body of the alien appeared in the exhibition in Beijing. When it appears in front of you, you can only think of adjectives such as “powerful” or “cunning”-it is crawling, looking like it is waiting for an opportunity, and it has an inherently uneasy atmosphere for humans.
This isn’t the first time Giger has worked for Hollywood. As early as when director Jodorowski spent a huge budget preparing for the sci-fi masterpiece “Dune”, Giger was one of the big guys who was invited with a lot of money. Although the plan was aborted later, Giger left a lot of design plans, which pointed out the general direction of art for David Lynch’s unsuccessful version of “Dune”.
The finished product is also on display: a chair designed specifically for Dune villain Baron Harkonnen. The chair is almost made of human bone structure, with three heads on the top and a long spine on the back, which is exactly the same as the style of “Alien”.
The later story is even more uncommon: Giger won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects with “Alien”. He did not have a dazzling academic qualifications, but he used a statuette to prove the results of his obsession with horror things for many years.
As for Kong Shanji, he was not some noble and independent painter. When he was young, he lived in Japan in the 1960s. A large number of foreign things quickly impacted traditional concepts. “Playboy” dazzled young Japanese who still retained some oriental reservations. The graceful naked body was his muse of inspiration. Fortunately, there are not only hormones in Sorayama’s brain. As a young man full of expectations for the future at that time, he understands machinery and is good at fantasy, so he combined bright metal with beauties to create a series of illustrations for Machina.
The mechanical female body described by Sorayama uses metal to unabashedly show the ideal naked sexy body. The body parts have both muscle tightness and sensual relaxation, but it is not reminiscent of pornography for a while. However, if you observe them closely at the Ullens Center for the Arts, you can see that the extruders are stretched and freehand, with a single breast ring, navel lines, and high-heeled sandals under their feet. These metal sculptures made of original paintings fully demonstrate the artist’s strong foundation in depicting female bodies for more than ten years.
Later, Sorayama Ki’s somewhat avant-garde art style was repeatedly welcomed by the field of fashion art. Some high-end brands used it as a source of inspiration to launch designs. The most famous one was the collaboration between the painter and Dior in 2019. At the Tokyo Early Autumn Show that year, the official placed a 12-meter-high aluminum mechanical girl on the venue, and launched a futuristic light show around her. This symbol pays tribute to Sorayama Ki’s artistic attainments.
This sense of the future comes from the vitality of the Machina girls. They abandon the rigidity of the robots and are comparable to the beautiful and delicious human beauties in the magazines. Combined with the fact that AI will soon grab jobs in all walks of life, the mecha girls appearing in front of my eyes, somewhat has a hint of danger and temptation.
Interestingly, Sorayama is better at drawing female bodies, but the popularity of Machina has made his style move towards science fiction. On the eve of the millennium, Sony invited Sorayama to participate in the design of a companion robot dog “AIBO”-I can also see this little guy in the Ullens Museum of Art.
AIBO once became a representative of the new century, a cultural phenomenon, and you can still see it in many film and television works today, and it was once considered to be the trend of future technology. The developers of Sony and AIBO also firmly believe that robots will penetrate into people’s daily life in 2010, and that future technology must belong to robots.
However, more than ten years after the dog came out, Sony held a funeral for the AIBO project and declared failure to the ambitious robot plan. It eventually became part of retro-futurism, along with Ex Machina.
The masters are not really good at guiding the future, but these are enough to inspire their successors – the success of “Alien” once made Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Finn Qi and many other famous directors have subsequently brought about changes in all aspects of the field of film and art creation. Perhaps everything is secretly influencing and interacting with each other to bring us to the real future.
In fact, Giger’s movie has always been my favorite B-movie, with its star-studded cast and special effects. The most important thing is that it has been with me to end the period of ignorance and enter the youth. It’s a pity that no one mentions it long ago. ——Caesar ZX
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