The greatest and most disturbing artist ever!

This guy makes H.R. Giger and Joel Peter Widtkin look like total pussies!

Check out his gallery here:

http://fx.sakura.ne.jp/~sympow/poiso...ryuz/index.cgi

His name is Waita Uziga and he's published 6 volumes of manga to date, all of which are snuff/torture themed. Highly recommended if you can stomach this kind of stuff (some of it makes even me feel rather queasy) but sadly only available in Japanese for now.

You are definitely right that it takes away from the shock value. But then again if you read some of his stories you'll be glad it's a comic and not more realistic. In his latest anthology he has a story about a slave girl who gets pregnant by her captor. When she's in her 9th month of pregancy he cuts her open, rips out the fetus, rapes the unborn baby while the girl begs for its life. Then he puts it in a blender, mixes it until it's just mush and then proceeds to pour the remains out in front of the crying woman. Really upbeat, life-afirming stuff!

And it most likely appeals to the same audience as well. It amuses me that even the most hardcore horror fans have their limits of what they can enjoy and what is "sick". For me, as long as it isn't real, there's no such thing as too fucked up. That particular story from MAI-CHAN'S DAILY LIFE made me depressed for days. Now *that* is powerful storytelling! Most of the pap that passes as horror these days just bores the hell out of me. I like to be shocked and disgusted and grossed out. I want the artist to knock me out with a sledgehammer and then assrape me with his AIDS infected dick and taint me forever! The only reason I like horror is because I like to experience extreme emotions. This is WHY.

Define "art". Only because you don't like it doesn't mean it isn't art. Too many people will argue that "art" is what is beautiful, what pleases the eye. But beauty (and thus art) is in the eye of the beholder.

Again, I'm surprised that this comes from someone posting at a horror MSG board ... 99% of all people would dismiss any and all horror films as worthless trash that should be banned or destroyed and has no value (artistic or otherwise) whatsoever. But I don't agree with that kind of redneck reasoning.

Art has always been about violence. Go back to cave drawings, which were usually about hunting and killing animals. Look at paintings from ancient Greece or Rome or the work of the great painters of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and so on, and you'll find more blood and guts and bare boobies than anything else. Man has always been fascinated by sex and death, Eros and Thanatos, creation and destruction, the alpha and omega. Those are the corner stones of our existance and it is only natural to think about them and to communicate your findings to others through whatever medium you find at your disposal.

I find that people like Waita Uziga or Suehiro Maruo (whose work has been collected in English in the anthology ULTRA GASH INFERNO) are very much in the tradition of the Grand Guignol theater of France and also the Marquis de Sade. Of course you are entitled to your opinion and I certainly won't argue that everyone should look at (or like looking at) things like that. But they are valid expressions of our human struggle with our instinct-driven animalistic heritage and that, combined with the cathartic effect that they (can) have qualifies them as art in my eyes.

I strongly doubt that he's all that misogynistic, seeing as he's been happily married for many years now and has children. Look at the personal lifes of any of the authors or directors who create really messed up stuff and you'll find that most of them are the most harmless and pleasant people to be around. Stephen King and Clive Barker - to choose the most obvious examples - are no bloodthirsty maniacs only because they write horror.

People who can exorcise their demons by creating this horrific art are much more harmless than all those arch-catholic repressed Bible-thumping types and you'll find that it is those people, those who repress their destructive urges and cannot channel them into creativity of some sort, who will go on to commit the most heinous crimes imaginable, while very, very few artists are known to have taken their fictional obsessions into real life.

You confuse racism and prejudices with valid arguments. I find comments like this much more frightening than anything Uziga draws.

I may like Suehiro Maruo even more than Waita Uziga. Maruo's stories have real psychological depth and characters you can understand. His artwork is not very typical for current manga but much more influenced by old Japanese woodcuts and illustrations from the 40ies and 50ies.

I highly recommend you buy the two graphic novels of his that have been published in English, ULTRA GASH INFERNO and MR. ARASHI'S AMAZING FREAK SHOW. Both are readily available at amazon or wherever you want to buy them. The full length PLANET OF THE JAPS story is included in the anthology UNDERGROUND COMICS JAPAN, which is a good compilation despite the ass-ugly and highly inappropriate cover. The stuff that is online is only the first few pages and trust me it get way more disturbing than that ...

Cabal, thanks for pointing out Antoine Bernhart! I'll have to look for more by this guy! Do you know if he's just a painter or if he also has done manga?

Well, he has done one "normal" adult manga titled IN THE MUD that doesn't have any mutilation, torture or snuff. Other than that he seems to have found his niche (and a certain fame/infamy). What I like about him is that he obviously has the talent to make his money in the mainstream of manga publishing but he chose to do this kind of work. Is it just a cry for attention, a way to make people take notice in an overly crowded marketplace? That may figure into the equation but I don't think anyone who is not into this kind of creepy shit would start drawing it just to pay the rent or get noticed. You have to have the fucked up imagination first and I don't blame him for making money and a name for himself by putting it to such ultimately harmless use.

No problem. I respect your opinion. And I agree that Giger and Witkin have more atmosphere and depth to their artwork than Uziga. There's a darkly poetic ambiguity to much of their work that is completely lacking in Uziga's drawings and stories. You can sit down and analyze and discuss a Giger painting but there's no such depth to be found in Uziga's work. His manga are like gore fast food and are indeed mostly schock value. I love them mostly because so little manages to genuinely disturb and gross me out be he does the trick. I cannot say that anything by Giger or Witkin has disturbed me in years. Maybe when I first discovered them but not anymore. They are certainly the more genuine artists, though, and I'd say it'll be their work rather than Uziga's that will stand the test of time. So yes, calling him the "greatest artist" was probably a bit of hyperbole on my part. However, he really is "the most disturbing artist" for me at the moment. The story with the baby in the blender, while ultimately pretty shallow and one note, hit me like a ton of bricks. Just totally not what I expected and I was already familiar with his work.

Yeah, Hideshi Hino is great but his stuff is not nearly as disgusting as Uziga's, despite Hino's involvement with the GUINEA PIG series way back when for which he directed FLOWER OF FLESH AND BLOOD. However, Hino is definitely the better storyteller of the two. There are quite a few of his books now available in English, including the great, atmospheric THE RED SNAKE and the rather Kafkaesque THE BUG BOY.