Nobuyoshi Araki

signed in English on a label affixed to the reverse, executed and published in 1993, printed in 2010, this work is from an edition of 10, framed

EROTOS, Libro Port Publishing Co. Ltd., Tokyo, 1993, pp. 132-133

The Works of Nobuyoshi Araki, Heibonsha Limited, Tokyo, 1997, pp. 76-77

Nobuyoshi Araki: Self, Life, Death, Phaidon Press Limited, 2005, p. 576

ARAKI, TASCHEN, Köln, 2007, pp. 348-349

The work is in good condition overall. There are no apparent condition issues with this work. Mounted and framed under perspex and not examined out of frame.
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This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo. 

 

If Nobuyoshi Araki's photographs were controversial and shocking to the world when he first exhibited them decades ago, they still are today.  Perpetually curious and driven by an insatiable hunger to devour the world around him, Araki will keep taking pictures of everything and anything and the results will continue to surprise.  His images have graced art books, photo anthologies, academic literary journals, porn magazines, SM periodicals, exhibition catalogues and even calendars.  The legendary Japanese photographer has carved out a place for himself in the international pantheon of contemporary artists who have selected the camera as their creative vehicle.  Despite his early forays into film, as his concentration in college was in both photography and filmmaking, he has stayed remarkably loyal to his medium of choice.  The numerous volumes chronicling his prolific output have penetrated all corners of the global art stage, inserting his name into every canonical text on the development of photography.  Despite his widespread reach, maximal exposure and overwhelming fame, Araki has not diverged from his path since its beginning—he continues to stroll about in Tokyo and snaps away at whim.

A man of many faces, he is perhaps best known for his notorious role as a visual predator of women in all possible configurations.  The female body, often constrained in bondage, is proffered as tribute at the altar of Araki.  A perverse fixation or not, his immediate association with most definitely pornographic depictions of women has fossilized and evolved into something of a brand.  Private fantasies, adulterous desires, erotic fetishes will forever surround the persona of Araki and his oeuvre.  Rivalling his efforts at recording the women in varying levels of sexualization is his compulsion to document moments of daily life. 

As obsessively as he consumes women with his lens, he consumes voraciously Tokyo in all its ordinary faces.  The sheer quantity of pictures that he takes can be gathered and restrung into a photographic narrative, like a film presented via a sequence of its constituent stills.  Flowers, in the manner of Georgia O'Keefe, have also been an object of sensual fascination for the artist.

Their natural beauty, brilliant colours and uncanny resemblance to female genitalia have had a magnetic pull on Araki's camera.  Beneath all his frenzied shooting, however, is a distinct strand of sentimentalism, Araki's palpitating impulse to probe the states of love, life and death.  Where do they overlap?  When do they intersect?  Upon his beloved wife Yoko's death, the artist published two memoirs with pictures first of their honeymoon, then the latter of her hospitalization and funeral.  A delicate intimacy fills the space in every single one of these photographs.  The loving tenderness lingers and is later echoed in a series dedicated to his cat Chiro and another to a group of mothers and their babies, "Mother and Child".  A man of many epithets, Araki deserves them all.

It is out of this colourful and versatile legacy that the works on offer (Lots 651, 652) emerge.  They are extracted from the "Erotos" series, for which an exquisitely designed catalogue was published in 1993.  Conceived by Araki, the word "Erotos" has its etymological origins in the two Latin nouns "Eros" and "Thanatos," the earlier meaning "intimate love" or the name of the goddess of sexual love and beauty in Greek mythology, and the latter "death" or the Greek deity who personified Death.  Akt-Tokyo: Nobuyoshi Araki 1971-1991 at Parco Gallery in Shibuya, Tokyo, was where the images compiled into "Erotos" were first exhibited in Japan and where this beautiful catalogue was on sale.  In true Araki fashion, the National Police Agency came to the event and arrested several people including the curator, accusing them of showing obscene images in public.  The catalogues were confiscated.  Araki was questioned and his house and office were searched!  The Austrian publisher of "Erotos" got wind of this news and was thoroughly surprised as the same exhibition had been held year ago in Austria—both the show and the photo book received tremendous critical acclaim. 

In this series, Araki sets out to build a compendium of surrealist still-life's.  Unlike his other series where the images are better read collectively, each "Erotos" photograph constitutes an inimitable instance.  Where the content is often inanimate objects couched in the neglected recesses of an everyday setting, the composition is designed and fit within the four corners of the viewer so that the outcome is something else entirely.  The knowing eye of Araki is exposed through his discovery of the latent eroticism lurking in the most mundane and unlikely of details.  Every image embodies its very own assembly of dichotomies.  Rapt with the intensity of a tension tautly suspended between subject and metaphor, quotidian and non-quotidian, the photographs force our eyes to identify familiar from unfamiliar, to decide what is organic and what is contrived, then to react with admiration or repulsion.  Under extreme magnification, that which divides the signified from the signifier is blurred even more.  In a quintessentially Man Ray-esque fashion, a simple act of rotation renders Erotos (Lot 651).  A moist pair of lips slightly ajar dominates the frame—presented vertically, the image is now suddenly charged with a raw, unexpected energy.  The composition is only interrupted only by two lone strands of hair to the corner, or do they enhance?  The suggestion is made and the effect is compelling.  The female body has always been a target of Araki's fascination and exploration—every anatomical part comes under his discerning lens and assumes a renewed aesthetic role.  The manic photographer never exhausts of possibilities to gaze at her curves, her textures or her configurations, not always natural, not necessarily literal, but always provocative.  Erotos (Lot 652) depicts a snail in all its slimy splendour, loafing on male genitalia.  Shapes, forms and silhouettes reign high in this frame.  Against the dark night and after enlargement, textures are revealed, this time to soften the suggestion and detract from reality.  Look at the world through the eyes of Araki and play an ocular game of reverse sublimation—this is the invitation, this is the mandate. 

The photographer himself embodies the most fundamental paradox of the Japanese identity.  While he is constantly monitored and repeatedly condemned for his myriad audacious images, he is at the same time fully and deeply embraced as something of a national superstar.  What is simultaneously being suppressed so vehemently by the authorities seems to be what the masses can't get enough of.  Fame can be generated out of shock only in a nation so transparent and so loud in its censorial efforts based on moral grounds.  Yet this is the same nation with a rampant, thriving, legal sex industry that has spawned legions of "hostesses", many underage, and has attracted hordes of men who populate numerous clubs and love hotels that cover the city; also the same nation that is a prolific, innovative, celebrated producer and exporter of adult pornographic films in Asia.  In truth, the popularity with which his exhibitions have been received all over the world has only served to varnish the squeaky clean nameplate of his native country.  The icon of erotica in photography is not only that, the sheer number of his works has penetrated every layer of the Japanese cultural conscious.  The reach of his photography and his influence is maximal.  Perhaps his greatest contribution wasn't to conflate fine art with the erotic and endeavouring to achieve such a daunting task in a country as incompatible as Japan, but to have eroticized the everyday, to have photographed life and finally to have laced it all with a gentle romance.  Perhaps Araki is not a release, not a haven, not an escape, but simply an innocuous documentarian for a country lodged very uncomfortably between aggression and submission.  Armed with his camera, he captures Japan in its postwar age.   

Nobuyoshi Araki's work is collected by The Cartier Foundation, Deutsche Bank, UBS Art Collection, Peter Norton (Tate) Collection, Art Collection Neue Borse and selected museums such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg; Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama.