The Music Work

For X Japan’s landmark Jealousy, George created the cover’s visual concept and executed it on skin: custom biomechanical chest and arm prosthetics sculpted directly onto Yoshiki, binding him in a cage-like structure of organic, sinewy metal — containment, vulnerability, and agony as album art. The organic-metal piping in this site’s ornaments comes from this cover.

George and X Japan guitarist hide (Hideto Matsumoto) were close friends and creative partners. For hide’s debut solo album, George sculpted one of the most recognizable icons in Japanese rock: a sci-fi alien mask with a large third eye in the forehead, mechanical piping, and a metallic finish — fiberglass and rubber, fabricated at George’s studio. The album cover shows hide’s face half-swallowed by it. After hide’s death the mask became a fixture of memorial exhibits; on this site, the third eye is the logo. That’s not an accident.

For Mark Romanek’s “Closer”, George built the video’s most disturbing icon physically: a heart of silicone, resin, and rubber. Hidden pneumatic tubes let him pump the beat by hand, live, matched to the song’s BPM — and between takes the crew sprayed it with liquid freon, condensing a cold vapor haze so the organ read as wet and freshly excised. A functional machine wearing a biological body: his “visceral anti-realism” in one prop.

For the Mechanical Animals cover and Paul Hunter’s “The Dope Show” video, George designed and built the custom silicone body suit and chest prosthetics — the smooth, nipple-less breast design that gave Manson an eerie, genderless, plastic-alien body matching the album’s themes of artificiality and isolation. One of the most recognizable album images of the 90s, and it’s a sculpture.

Wayne Isham needed the band to be plastic marionette dolls in a toy store. George (with makeup artist Elan Bongiorno) designed custom face-cast prosthetics: ultra-thin silicone appliances erasing natural skin texture under a specialized high-gloss lacquer — toy-sheen that had to survive bright studio lighting for a 22-hour continuous shoot without cracking. Six hours per member, every shoot day. It won the 2001 MVPA Award for Best Makeup in a Music Video.

Across Iowa (2001) and Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses) (2004), George brought film-grade prosthetic craft to masks that had to survive touring. For Iowa he refined and cast the band’s heavy latex-and-leather masks, adding his signature organic-decay texture. For Vol. 3 he worked directly with Corey Taylor on the iconic stitched, distressed “scarred face” mask — thick latex, built to look sickening at arena distance and hold up to a two-hour set. The stitching on this site’s section dividers is a nod to that mask.