■““No matter what the circumstances…””

MOTAS. / Untitled

Let’s get back to Hirochika Machida’s work at the beginning. He usually paints the landscapes with the mix of nostalgic and modern atmosphere, but is also specialized in illustrations featuring animals and cartoon characters. You can find his dexterity as an artist in “Penguin On The Last Ice” that depicts the ocean dynamically waving and sweeping everything away with the hint of the urgency of the climate crisis, meanwhile satirizing human beings that should be responsible for global warming but actually indifferent to it by expressing the relaxed penguin in the center of the scene. Machida’s work is full of such catchy and pop ironies.

On the other hand, in MOTAS.’s work “Untitled”, you can recognize the abstract creatures, possibly a parent and child, wandering the sea with tears streaming down. The figures, the touch and colors of the painting give us a sense of vanity. A globe is floating on the sea, but looking closely, you will find that there is no land but only the ocean on it. All the landscapes, such as the deep green forests full of lives, the panoramic savanna with animals roaming about and the houses and neon cities that human beings have built up over the years, might have all sunk into the sea.

In 2020, MOTAS. began to draw works with the motif of a “bent middle finger” named BLEYE(the abstract creatures in “Untitled”), projecting the emotions peculiar to human beings, through which they tries to express the process of moving toward nothingness. In that sense, “Untitled” seems also capturing the process in which the climate keeps changing and the earth, human beings and BLEYE eventually return to nothingness. That could be the main source of “vanity” in this work, and at the same time, the child BLEYE gives us a sense of sadness at being destined to inherit the changing earth from his parent. The tears of regret pouring down from the parent BLEYE with half body in the sea might have caused the sea level to rise even higher.

MOTAS. says that BLEYE embodies the idea that “no matter what the circumstances, there is always tomorrow and we will live with something on our shoulders.”

■BLEYE, can you see the future?

If the temperature rises by 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius as the global warming gets more severe, it will be irreversible for the global environment, causing not only the sea level rise but also a variety of other disasters, such as loss of biodiversity, typhoons and heavy rains, droughts, heat waves and forest fires.

For the sake of preventing these impacts, many countries around the world discussed and adopted “Paris Agreement” in 2015. It sets a global goal to limit the average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, keeping it below 2 degrees Celsius since the industrial revolution era.

1.5 degrees Celsius rise will inevitably have various impacts, but even a difference of 0.5 degrees between 1.5 and 2 degrees will make a huge influence, as shown below;

IPCC「1.5度特別報告書」を元に作成

■Only four years left

To limit the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius requires us to halve the greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. If we have undertaken it in 2010, the required reduction of emissions would have been just 3.3% annually, though unfortunately we were too lazy to do it.

Now, we would need to reduce 7.6% per year for 10 years starting in 2020 and 15.4% per year for 5 years starting in 2025. That reduction rate, however, is said to be almost impossible. Namely, we have only about four years left.