There’s always an end to the glory

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I've noticed that frequently Oriental artwork is not bound by the golden proportion. Rather, the division is one side full of detail and the other a void. Our human reality balanced against something else altogether. These oil paintings, and the text below, is from the website of the Japanese artist Arisa Kumagai.

Leisure Class

I grew up in the red light district.

My family ran a business selling glitzy Italian clothes to mafia, and to the ladies working in the brothel located just behind our fancy shop.

Surrounded by decadent luxury, I was literally pounded in to acquire the taste of leisurely class.

Defined by T. Veblen, people from this class spent until they drop on themselves to attain social dignity.

I was born in 1991,so the history of socio-economic decline synchronized with mine.

I grew to believe that vanity was the only salvation.

In the absence of God, I saw beauty in excessive decoration.

There was swirl of desire, poor and rich. The more prosperous meant more ornamental.

There was gush of beasty energy, life and death. The more vibrant meant more embellishing.

But I found in that whirl a gleam, a residue or a kind of mutant, in the form of a human body.

Now my religion is to worship the surplus, something magnificent and yet something non-functional, like art.

But I also know from my up bringing that there’s always an end to the glory; that it all sinks into the dark, death-like void.