The author of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, is believed to say "Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar." In the art of modern painter and photographer Emi Makida (b. 1991), the cigar is always a phallus. Makida's images show life and death, two powers ruling the world, which are depicted as phallic eruptions followed by corruption. The pictures of dismembered corpses, embodying death and accomplished in a manner looking like a mix of Shunga and Max Ernst and Zdzisław Beksiński, adjoin the dozens of flourishing phalluses that remind us of various pagan cults.
Fig. 1. Emi Makida (emi-makida.com)
Fig. 2. Self portrait living in great optimism（Dedicated to Gantonokan), 2019 (instagram.com)
Fig. 3. Existence (instagram.com)
Fig. 4. instagram.com
Fig. 5. Self-Hate, 2011 (emi-makida.com)
Fig. 6. Scars of Youth, 2018 (emi-makida.com)
Fig. 7. instagram.com
