Best known for his sexually explicit photographs of bound women, prolific and controversial Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki has worked for nearly 50 years to complicate and challenge the role of intimacy in photography. A new Araki retrospective opens this month in New York. And what a better place than the Museum of Sex (MoSEX). The Incomplete Araki: Sex, Life, and Death in the Work of Nobuyoshi Araki traces his entire career.
It reminds us that Araki is driven by an obsession with photography’s tension between the private and public, the autobiographical and the fictional; his lifelong commitment to the idea that photography should be immediate, unflinching, and deeply personal has resulted in a body of work that ranges from the most sexually explicit and controversial photographs to those that expose the vulnerability of love and loss.
The Incomplete Araki also examines Araki’s career through the themes and conversations that are inseparable from his photographic production and practice. Throughout the exhibition, Araki’s work is accompanied by the personal perspectives of his collaborators, muses, critics, fans, and fellow photographers.
Araki is first introduced through the idea of controversy: asking what has made his work infamous, reviled, and adored in both Japan and in global art communities? His kinbaku-bi (緊縛美 Japanese rope bondage) photographs are positioned as fraught images that help to explain the debate around pornography and art, eroticism, intimacy, sexism, and the potential fetishization of East Asian women in art. These conversations lead to questions about Araki’s practice, and the performance of his identity within his own photography, where the exhibition examines the role of the “I-novel” (私小説 shishōsetsu) and the presence of the artist in photographic work.
The exhibition further identifies the themes and ways of making that are so prevalent within Araki’s work that they take on the feeling of the obsessed: sources of inspiration like kinbaku-bi and Japanese art historical forms like Ukiyo-e (浮世絵), the idea of “sentimentality,” Araki’s deeply loving marriage with his wife Yōko and her tragic early death, the buzzing, lustful nightlife of the Tokyo underbelly, and the inescapable sense in Araki’s work that life, love, and sex are always tinged by an inevitable mortality. “I want to make photographs that maintain their incompleteness”, says Nobuyoshi Araki. I don’t want them to lose their reality, presence, speed, heat, or humidity. Therefore, I stop and shoot before they become refined or sophisticated.”
In addition, all of Araki’s photographic work featured in the exhibition is furthered supported by a massive interactive installation of his hundreds of photobooks—placing at the heart of the show a conversation about the importance of dissemination, media, and form.
The Incomplete Araki: Sex, Life, and Death in the Work of Nobuyoshi Araki
Museum of Sex
233 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
USA
