Study of a bad boy of Japanese art

Is Makoto Aida a misogynist? It seems a fair question. Among his cheerfully scattershot collection at the Mori Art Museum is a series of -style paintings called , showing naked young women with severed and bandaged limbs being led around on a leash. A 62-minute video depicts the artist tediously masturbating in front of the kanji characters "beautiful young girl". In , he uses more naked girls to make a bloody milkshake. What was the thinking there? "Well," he says, smiling, "If I made a shake with men it wouldn't taste very good."

That reply - glib, irreverent and a bit irritating - is vintage Aida. As Mori curator David Elliott says in his introduction to the largest-ever exhibition of Aida's work, covering a quarter of a century: "Nothing seems to add up - on purpose."

Aida often resembles a clever but alienated schoolboy, scrawling caricatures of the teachers and tossing peppery one-liners from the back of the class. And like the schoolboy he becomes squirmy and inarticulate when asked to discuss the "meaning" of his art, although he's happier describing its origins. "I can't really explain this stuff," he says. "That's why I draw, I suppose."

Aida's bad-boy persona made its first appearance about 27 years ago in one of his breakout international pieces: (1986) depicts a squadron of second world war "Zero" planes attacking a burning downtown Manhattan, in a startling artistic premonition of 9/11. Just in case that failed to offend New Yorkers, (designed in the style of the famous John Lennon scrawled lyric) shows the doomed twin towers viewed from the cockpit of a plane. Not surprisingly, perhaps, one review of his work is dubbed: "Monuments to Misanthropy".

His own Japanese title for the Mori exhibition, "Sorry for Being a Genius", gives perhaps a more apt flavour of the 47-year-old's boyish, provocative sense of humour.

Is he a purveyor of Japanese revenge fantasies? Hardly - Aida's an equal opportunity offender. In (1999), smiling pensioners play croquet with the severed heads of Asian children. Just in case we miss the message, the croquet team is called "Great East Asia", a nod to wartime Japan's bloody imperialist project, the "Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere".