Family Taking Refuge from a Bombing Raid

Masuda belongs to a generation brought up in the early years of video games, when virtual reality took the form of heavily pixelated images. Much of his work has been concerned with what he calls the ‘image gap’ that sits, disconcertingly and teasingly, between the digital CG (computer-graphic) images he creates and the solid, colourful objects he produces from those images. He believes that the odd sensation felt by people when faced by this ‘image gap’ can encourage them to reflect on the uncertain boundaries between the real and the virtual that increasingly characterise the modern world.

In this reinterpretation of a vase from the Miyagawa Kozan workshop dating from the late 1870s adorned with an eagle, Masuda has made the imaginative leap of grafting onto the work a commentary about the atrocities of the wars that rage in Syria and other parts of the world. He has turned the sitting eagle of the original vase into a McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle fighter-bomber and the mother bear and cub in the cave into a human family cowering in a basement as bombs rain down from above.