ARAKI/SAEKI The fantasma(ero)tic heritage of shunga

ARAKI/SAEKI EXHIBITION The fantasma(ero)tic heritage

“ All creation is nourished, in reaction or by being inspired by it, by the imagination of previous eras.
The photographer Araki Nobuyoshi and the designer Saeki Toshio are thus part of the lineage of expressions of Japanese graphic art that span centuries. »

Araki Nobuyoshi and Saeki Toshio, Emulators of a Centuries-Old Erotic Art

All creation feeds, in reaction or by being inspired by it, by the imagination of previous eras. The photographer Araki Nobuyoshi (1940) and the designer Saeki Toshio (1945-2019) are thus in the line of expressions of Japanese graphic art that run over centuries, from drawing to illustration, painting, engraving — without their works being able to be reduced to this simple inspiration. The erotic, grotesque, perverse, scabrous or horrible images that a current of Japanese art conveys haunt their imagination. And both have had to deal with censorship for having shaken up the taboos of their time. "Censorship forces one to have imagination..." Araki says ironically.

Before contact with the West, in the middle of the 19th century, Japan experienced a sexuality uninhibited by any suspicion-guilt of pleasure. Buddhism certainly condemns desire, a source of illusion, but it did not thematize sexuality as such – no more than the Shinto cult (a sort of polytheistic animism pre-existing its arrival). Sexual mores were regulated by propriety, that is to say social prohibitions and carnal pleasure was part of the arts of existence. This was particularly the case in the Edo period (1603-1868), hedonistic and libertine in many respects.

The erotic images (shunga, "spring images") that had existed before then experienced an extraordinary boom with the technique of colored prints: "brocade prints" (nishiki-e). Most of the great masters of ukiyo-e (Utamaro, Hokusai, Kunisada...) devoted themselves to them. Borrowing from a playful or parodic eroticism, they were widely distributed. Women were not the last to look at them.

The term shunga was used from the Meiji era (1868-1911). Previously, they were called pillow prints (makura-e)—sex was a bodily practice like any other that had to be initiated. And as such, they were often offered to newlyweds. They were also called warai-e (prints for fun). Funny, trivial, they were often looked at by several people (men and women). Heterosexual or homosexual couples (male or female), couplings, mirror games, voyeurism, comical scenes... are some figures of this rich imaginative register. In Meiji, they were banned in order to appear "civilized" to Westerners seized by Victorian puritanism.

At the beginning of the 20th century, during what are known as Japan's "Roaring Twenties", a movement called ero-guro-nansensu (erotic, grotesque, absurd) appeared in the nascent mass culture, driven by unbridled creativity, a quest for the bizarre and the perverse, feeding a carefree attitude that is not without recalling the atmosphere of the Weimar Republic as the dark years of Nazism and, in Japan, militarism loomed. The spirit of pleasure, repressed during the militarist period, would be reborn in the ruins of the defeat of 1945 in an exaltation of the body and a frantic quest to live in the moment, then during the rich counterculture of the 1960s.

One of the great figures of this period was Saeki Toshio. Reviving the spirit of "ero-guronansensu" by combining a sometimes macabre eroticism with an irony inspired by traditional motifs, his work reflects the hopes carried by the counterculture and then the disillusionments of the following decade which, for him, turn into a nightmarish fresco. A derealization of the world in which eroticism, grating laughter and fear - inspired by the ghosts (yurei) and fantastic creatures (yokai) that populate Japanese folklore - go hand in hand with sex. Throughout history, images of monstrous creatures have often been a reflection of social tensions: this was the case at the end of the Tokugawa regime (first half of the 19th century): kabuki plays were full of horror scenes. In modern times, this jumble of the supernatural from the dawn of time has not disappeared: technology has made it possible to multiply its figures.

Araki shows a taste for the trivial and the excessive, but also for disjointed dolls or miniature plastic figurines from anime and manga that often interact with the women he photographs.

Of his prolific work, we often only remember the images of tied-up women: which is reductive, even if they are numerous. This is evidenced by his first self-published book, Voyage sentimental (1971), then countless photographs of the streets of Tokyo in his youth and later of Shinjuku, the famous red-light district, or portraits of women who are not naked, or partially so.

His bound women are inspired by the tradition of "rope art" (kinbaku: tight binding). A centuries-old practice of torture, binding became an erotic game at the beginning of the 20th century, one of whose initiators was the painter and illustrator Ito Seiu (1882-1961). As a punishment, binding required a good knowledge of anatomy so that the torture could last... A know-how that is possessed today by the masters of kinbaku, who cleverly avoid painful compressions.

The faces of Araki's bound and suspended women thus express no pain or shame. Devoid of the sadism attributed to him – which the author vehemently rejects – his photographs of suspended women are reminiscent of "a delicate Calder mobile" notes Philippe Forest (Araki enfin, l'homme qui vécut pour aimer, Gallimard, 2008).

Philippe Pons

The exhibition is on view from October 18 to January 11, 2025 at 119 rue Vieille du Temple, Paris