8/9/2005

Hiro Yamagata (ヒロ・ヤマガタ ) is a wildly commercially-successful Japanese artist who you can find sold every shopping mall (estimated $4 billion in sales a year). He is going to “help” the people of Afghanistan with his laser-disco Buddha(tm) reincarnation. Cost? Nine million dollars and he’s a asking for your donations.
Party on Buddha happy!

Taro’s rendering of what Yamagata may have planned.
A reincarnation for ancient Buddhas
Artist hopes to ‘re-create’ statues destroyed by Taliban
…the former Taliban regime in Afghanistan destroyed two 1,600-year-old Buddha statues lining Bamiyan Valley’s soaring cliffs…Now, Los Angeles artist Hiro Yamagata hopes to commemorate the towering Buddhas by projecting multicolored laser images onto the clay cliffsides where the figures once stood, about 80 miles west of Kabul.
Against a canvas of desert darkness, 14 laser systems once a week will project 140 overlapping faceless “statues’ sweeping four miles across Bamiyan’s cliffs in neon shades of green, pink, orange, white and blue. Each image will continuously change color and pattern. Powered by solar panels and windmills, the 125- to 175-foot-high squiggle-style, Day-Glo images the same size as the original Buddhas would be in stark contrast to the austere, rural valley below, a land wracked by poverty and violence, a land that has little electricity of its own….

Check out Hiro Yamagata’s other laser works.