Nobuyoshi Araki Untitled (from the series: Kimbaku) Courtesy: Jablonka Galerie, Köln/Berlin © Nobuyoshi Araki
Nobuyoshi Araki is a controversial persona of the visual world whose work is integrally linked to life as seen from his eyes that are adapted to being the frame of possible photographs.
From such a perspective one can see why Araki’s body of work consists of every possible experienced or imaginary image he could capture. The abundant photographic albums that compile his work are a visual diary of his own life as well as a visual description of his ideas around the big question of existence. These notions are the frame on which every image is and will be taken.
Kinbaku (Japanese for the traditional craft of combining elements from the art of packaging and the art of flower decoration) is a series of b&w photographs of women tied up in Japanese ropes. In these series the most obvious element of Araki’s visual identity is that of eroticism and pornography-flirting postures. Despite their bondages, these women don’t seem helpless nor weak, unlike in a pornographic context, but on the contrary elevated in the artistic context of a three-party-gaze examination. That of the viewer, that of the photographer and that of the subject.
Once this triangle of energies is taken under consideration, the element of eroticism becomes even more vivid. The viewer experiences the exchange of gazes between the man behind the lens and the woman in front who is the object that through the lens looks straight at him/her, putting them in the third person’s awkward and exposed position that demands neutrality for it is taking place in the gallery context. In other words, viewing Kinbaku is a very personal interactivity in a very impersonal space – a controversy that applies through all of Araki’s work, as it is so autobiographical.
As the artist himself puts it, in Kinbaku he explores the different connotations of bondage in Eastern and Western culture. Perhaps, this point of differentiation is what prevents us from associating Araki’s work with porn. “Kinbaku (Knots with Ropes) are different from bondage. I only tie up a woman's body because I know I cannot tie up her heart. Only her physical parts can be tied up. Tying up a woman becomes an embrace.”
As viewers, in Kinbaku we can witness Araki’s seemingly painful but innocent obsession with women as mammals, as reproduction animals, as expressions of beauty and pleasure, as history, as knowledge.
“Meeting a woman anywhere teaches you more about the world than reading Balzac. Whether it be a wife, a woman encountered by happenstance, or a prostitute, she will teach you about the world. In fact I build my life on meeting women and I have hardly read a book since primary school. … I think that all the attractions in life are implied in women. There are many essential elements: beauty, disgust, obscenity, purity ... much more than one finds in nature. In woman, there is sky and sea. In woman, there is the flower and the bud ... ”
As capturing movement has always been thought of, photography is the medium to frame moments in time in a circular production and reproduction lane of life and death. In a photograph the object is stopped, motionless, dead. All these small deaths though, are coming from the action that’s equal to life itself for Araki, Photography. The lens is the lung and vision is able to contain all other senses in the experiencing of the images that represent real time existences of a past, a future or a non-existing time dimension.
This intensity of living around the moment is what connects Nobuyoshi Araki’s work with that of Ukiyo-e, a traditional Japanese craft of woodblock prints with subject matter around the ephemeral life and passing fragments of time, flown to nothingness.
Parallel to the exhibition at Jablonka Galerie in Berlin (2 May until 14 June 2008), the Kestnergesellschaft Hannover shows a presentation of 100 coloured photographs of the Kinbaku Series, together with woodcuts by Hokusai, one of the great masters of Ukiyo-e (from 22 February until 11 May 2008).
- chrisaphenia danai papagrigoriou
Nobuyoshi Araki: Untitled (from the series: Kimbaku), Courtesy: Jablonka Galerie, Köln/Berlin © Nobuyoshi Araki
Nobuyoshi Araki Untitled (from the series: Kimbaku) Courtesy: Jablonka Galerie, Köln/Berlin © Nobuyoshi Araki
