via Dazed Digital
Dubbed Japanโs most-controversial photographer,ย Nobuyoshi Arakiย has, for nearly half a century, pushed the boundaries of respectability to near-buckling point โ and beyond.
A new retrospective exhibition co-curated by Maggie Mustard andย Mark Snyder at New Yorkโsย Museum of Sexย celebrates the photographerโs body of work, a natural choice having spent a lifetime holding a mirror up to his nationโs complex relationship to sexuality and its censorship. Given the occasion, though, itย could be easy to forget the very reason why this work is still so important.
Arakiโsย obsession for capturing unflinching erotic imagery that exists somewhere between the private and the public, theย real and the imagined, could, in a post-Weinstein era, be pushed aside as no more than another male gaze on the female body. A reduction of a womanโs image to no more than an object to desire and obtain โ if only one with the talent for capturing this abuse of power on film. But the very thing that makes this photographic master so interesting is that itโs much more complex than his simply beingย notย just that. His work, and perhaps the man himself, is a cycle of constant contradiction in a world where the line between narrative and fiction is never clear.
Itโs important for any honest reading of his work to acknowledge thatย Arakiโs oeuvre exists at aย point fairly late on a timeline of popular artists attempting to make sense of sexuality, and the uniquely Japanese understanding of what that means. More than his photographic contemporaries,ย Arakiโs work is closely connected to a very different history, one of sex in art. From theย shungaย works ofย Katsushika Hokusaiย andย Kitagawa Utamaro,ย masters ofย ukiyo-e,ย Japanโs (and arguably the worldโs) first mass-produced media in the form of titillating woodblock prints, to film and literature by the likes ofย Ryu Murakami andย Amy Yamada.
Rewind back to Japanโs Edo period (1603โ1867) โ which would become the Tokyo-centric modern Japanese culture we know โ and society found itself in a very particular structure that goes a long way to explain this unique relationship to sex and sexuality. Where respect and respectability were key currency in the city, an ordered, socially conservative existence could happily continue because, just down the river wasย ukiyoย (the โFloating Worldโ), 18th and 19th century Edoโs pleasure district. Here, everyone from soldiers to foreign merchants and monks could engage in all manner of carnal pleasures, just out of sight.
This was no mere back-alley brothel quarter, though. What was on offer inย ukiyoย was as sophisticated in its set up as it was sordid. From the ethereal geishas to the drama of the kabuki theatre, this illicit playground inspired the hearts of anyone with an itch to scratch, even spawning its own tourist takeaway in the form ofย ukiyo-eย (โpictures of the floating worldโ). These woodcut prints of lurid scenes captured the chaos of what went on (and was the format that gave rise to theย erotic art ofย shunga) โ a more important ancestor to mass media as we know it than any western art history will have you believe, and a huge influence on arguably every aspect of Arakiโs work.
Fast-forward to today and the lineage of this lurid world remains fairly intact, its descendants just slightly more neon-drenched than before. It is here during the mid 1980s that Araki, along with Akira Suei โ the editor-in-chief ofย Photo Age,ย a magazine which had taken to handing over a generous portion of its pages each month to the photo-provocateur โ would traverse the labyrinthine backstreets of Kabukichล, the cityโs most notorious red-light district known rather romantically as the โsleepless townโ.
for the full feature head toย Dazed Digital
