About the Work
Eroticism, dominance, submission and display of the obvious are situated in close proximity in the photographs of Nobuyoshi Araki. Unashamedly and in some cases disturbingly, they present nudity, corporeality and (male) desire – for which reason they are repeatedly subjected to censorship, not only in his native country of Japan. Yet pornographic images in art have a tradition extending throughout the world: from explicit murals at Pompeii and Renaissance engravings all the way to the Japanese Shunga woodcuts (literally: ‘springtime image’) – erotic prints from the 17th to 19th centuries.
The term ‘Kinbaku’ indicates the tying-up of (predominantly) naked women with ropes – a ritual action which immobilises the body and declares it to be a sexual object. Araki turns to this traditional form of Japanese art and recontextualises it in a completely different system of aesthetic and cultural reference – that of western art history. This shift of context combines an extra-European tradition with Eurocentric exoticism.
