Moriyama - Kagerou
2011.05.15
2011.05.15
While Photography is the medium which replaced woodblock printing and Araki the real successor of the masters of Shunga, Moriyama can properly be considered the artist who better incarnates the modern Ukiyo-e of Japanese post-war era. Anyway, instead of the "floating world" he found Japan as a much more shaggy and desolate environment: his high-contrasted photographs and cursed characters became the symbol of a new and not-hypocrite way of seeing the changes in the society and people since he founded, with a handful of friends (Nakahira and Sawatari being the most successful) the magazine Provoke. Nowadays, he's probably one of the most famous Japanese artists all over the world, waiting for the two-artist exhibition at Tate Modern in 2012 together with William Klein. Avshalom has chosen a selection of photos and vintage books having the Woman as protagonist: among them, the very iconic Tight in Shimotakaido, both the only two huge Kuchibiru on canvas still on the market (Red and Black colors), and a selection from Kagerou, the shocking series of 1972 which anticipated Araki's bondage photos of almost ten years.
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Hokusai - The Dream of the Fiserman's wife
2011.03.08
2011.03.08
" ...a terrifying plate...the nude form of a woman, swooning with pleasure..." (Edmond de Goncourt)
"The most beautiful Japanese erotic print that I know is truly frightening: it is of a Japanese woman mounted by an octopus; with its tentacles, the horrible beast sucks the tips of her breasts and rummages in her mouth, while its head drinks from her lower parts. The almost superhuman expression of agony and sorrow - which convulses this long, graceful female figure with aquiline nose - and the hysterical joy - which emanates at the same time from her forehead, from those eyes closed as in death - are admirable". (J.K. Huysman)
Hokusai (1760 - 1849) is recognized as the greatest Japanese artist of Ukiyo-e. And, for sure, this is the most famous Japanese shunga (erotic woodblock print) ever made. The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (蛸と海女 Tako to ama, literally Octopus and shell diver, dated c. 1814), also known as Girl Diver and Octopi, Diver and Two Octopi, etc., depicts a woman, evidently an ama (a shell diver), enveloped in the arms of two octopuses. The larger of the two mollusks performs cunnilingus on her, while the smaller one, perhaps his son, assists on the right by fondling her mouth and nipple. In the text above the image the woman and the creatures express their mutual sexual pleasure from the encounter.
Scholar Danielle Talerico notes that the image would have recalled to the minds of contemporary viewers the story of Princess Tamatori, highly popular in the Edo period. In this story, Tamatori is a modest shell diver who marries Fujiwara no Fuhito of the Fujiwara clan, who is searching for a pearl stolen from his family by Ryūjin, the dragon god of the sea. Vowing to help, Tamatori dives down to Ryūjin's undersea palace of Ryūgū-jō, and is pursued by the god and his army of sea creatures, including octopuses. She cuts open her own breast and places the jewel inside; this allows her to swim faster and escape, but she dies from her wound soon after reaching the surface.
The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife is often cited as an early forerunner of tentacle erotica, a motif that has been common in modern Japanese animation and manga since the late 20th century. Modern tentacle erotica similarly depicts sex between human women and tentacled beasts; notably, however, the sex in modern depictions is typically forced, as opposed to Hokusai's mutually pleasurable interaction. Psychologist and critic Jerry S. Piven, however, is skeptical that Hokusai's playful image could account for the violent depictions in modern media, arguing that these are instead a product of the turmoil experienced throughout Japanese culture following World War II. However, scholar Holger Briel argues that "only in a society that already has a predilection for monsters and is used to interacting with octopods such images might arise," citing Hokusai's print an early exemplar of such a tradition.
The work has influenced a number of later artists. For example, It was one of the many examples of Edo-period erotica known to Pablo Picasso, who painted his own adaptation in 1903. Picasso's version has been shown next to Hokusai's in exhibits on the influence of 19th-century Japanese art on Picasso's work.
The so-called "aria della piovra" ("Octopus aria") "Un dì, ero piccina" in Pietro Mascagni's opera Iris (1898), on a libretto by Luigi Illica, was inspired by this print. The main character Iris describes a screen she had seen in a Buddhist temple when she was a child, depicting an octopus coiling its tentacles around a smiling young woman and killing her. She recalls a buddhist priest explaining: "That octopus is Pleasure... That octopus is Death!"
Avshalom is proud to show this extremely rare Artwork, one of the very few still in private hands, along with other 17 woodcuts by the Artist, whose images we'll published as soon as our research will be completed, along with other later Japanese works inspired by this very icon.
Selected English Critical References (except Museum Catalogues)
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"The most beautiful Japanese erotic print that I know is truly frightening: it is of a Japanese woman mounted by an octopus; with its tentacles, the horrible beast sucks the tips of her breasts and rummages in her mouth, while its head drinks from her lower parts. The almost superhuman expression of agony and sorrow - which convulses this long, graceful female figure with aquiline nose - and the hysterical joy - which emanates at the same time from her forehead, from those eyes closed as in death - are admirable". (J.K. Huysman)
Hokusai (1760 - 1849) is recognized as the greatest Japanese artist of Ukiyo-e. And, for sure, this is the most famous Japanese shunga (erotic woodblock print) ever made. The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (蛸と海女 Tako to ama, literally Octopus and shell diver, dated c. 1814), also known as Girl Diver and Octopi, Diver and Two Octopi, etc., depicts a woman, evidently an ama (a shell diver), enveloped in the arms of two octopuses. The larger of the two mollusks performs cunnilingus on her, while the smaller one, perhaps his son, assists on the right by fondling her mouth and nipple. In the text above the image the woman and the creatures express their mutual sexual pleasure from the encounter.
Scholar Danielle Talerico notes that the image would have recalled to the minds of contemporary viewers the story of Princess Tamatori, highly popular in the Edo period. In this story, Tamatori is a modest shell diver who marries Fujiwara no Fuhito of the Fujiwara clan, who is searching for a pearl stolen from his family by Ryūjin, the dragon god of the sea. Vowing to help, Tamatori dives down to Ryūjin's undersea palace of Ryūgū-jō, and is pursued by the god and his army of sea creatures, including octopuses. She cuts open her own breast and places the jewel inside; this allows her to swim faster and escape, but she dies from her wound soon after reaching the surface.
The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife is often cited as an early forerunner of tentacle erotica, a motif that has been common in modern Japanese animation and manga since the late 20th century. Modern tentacle erotica similarly depicts sex between human women and tentacled beasts; notably, however, the sex in modern depictions is typically forced, as opposed to Hokusai's mutually pleasurable interaction. Psychologist and critic Jerry S. Piven, however, is skeptical that Hokusai's playful image could account for the violent depictions in modern media, arguing that these are instead a product of the turmoil experienced throughout Japanese culture following World War II. However, scholar Holger Briel argues that "only in a society that already has a predilection for monsters and is used to interacting with octopods such images might arise," citing Hokusai's print an early exemplar of such a tradition.
The work has influenced a number of later artists. For example, It was one of the many examples of Edo-period erotica known to Pablo Picasso, who painted his own adaptation in 1903. Picasso's version has been shown next to Hokusai's in exhibits on the influence of 19th-century Japanese art on Picasso's work.
The so-called "aria della piovra" ("Octopus aria") "Un dì, ero piccina" in Pietro Mascagni's opera Iris (1898), on a libretto by Luigi Illica, was inspired by this print. The main character Iris describes a screen she had seen in a Buddhist temple when she was a child, depicting an octopus coiling its tentacles around a smiling young woman and killing her. She recalls a buddhist priest explaining: "That octopus is Pleasure... That octopus is Death!"
Avshalom is proud to show this extremely rare Artwork, one of the very few still in private hands, along with other 17 woodcuts by the Artist, whose images we'll published as soon as our research will be completed, along with other later Japanese works inspired by this very icon.
Selected English Critical References (except Museum Catalogues)
- Bing, Alison; Eleanor Heartney and Kathryn Hoffman (2006). The madness and perversion of Yukio Mishima. Chronicle Books
- Briel, Holger (2010). "The Roving Eye Meets Traveling Pictures: The Field of Vision and the Global Rise of Adult Manga". In Berninger, Mark; Ecke, Jochen; and Haberkorn, Gideon,Comics As a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines, pp. 187–210. McFarland
- Forrer, Mathi (1992). Hokusai: Prints and Drawings
- Lane, Richard (1978). Images from the Floating World, The Japanese Print. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 10
- Lenehan-White, Anne. "Shunga and Ukiyo-e: Spring Pictures and Pictures of the Floating World". www.stolaf.edu
- Piven, Jerry S. (2004). The madness and perversion of Yukio Mishima. Greenwood Publishing Group
- Schwarz, Karl M. (1995). Netsuke Subjects: A Study on the Netsuke Themes with Reference to their Interpretation and Symbolism. Tuttle Publishing
- Symmes, Edwyn C. (1995). Netsuke: Japanese Life and Legend in Miniature. Böhlau Verlag Wien
- Talerico, Danielle (2001). “Interpreting Sexual Imagery in Japanese Prints: A Fresh Approach to Hokusai’s Diver and Two Octopi”. In Impressions, The Journal of the Ukiyo-e Society of America, Vol. 23.
- Uhlenbeck, Chris; Margarita Winkel, Ellis Tinios, Amy Reigle Newland (2005). Japanese Erotic Fantasies: Sexual Imagery of the Edo Period. Hotei.
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Wei Yi - FoodKids
2011.02.27
2011.02.27
Wei Yi is a Chinese artist well know for his large dramatical paintings showing real people and their betrayed hopes and dreams. As Avshalom, we have already introduced his series of Residence Permits and Ladies of the Carnal World, and now we are proud to have acquired the whole set of 5 sculptures and 6 oil paintings forming the set FoodKids.
They are eleven children Wei Yi personally met and came to know, but they represent more or less the whole set of nowadays children, not only in China but everywhere, even in the advanced Western societies. Kids are given the food, a lot of food, more than really needed: they grab huge pieces of it, especially pork (for Chinese the traditional symbol of a full meal and gastronomic well being, but also cheap and heavy, and in many cultures impure and even untouchable). But, although over-satisfied in the living necessities, their hearts and their mind are empty, and their hopeless expressions are more the portraits of sterile minds than that of the healthy bodies. Their parents are out for working, for buying as much as possible, and don't care of feeding their souls and minds.
Are these children doomed to be like their parents, living a selfish amoral and empty life, just waiting for dying? Is their destiny to be the same of billions of their peers, instead of an individual personality having the buy-and-use lullaby of modern globalized society? Or, thanks to the lack of starvation, have they the chance of letting their spirits come out and becoming aware and conscious adults? Wei Yi called them with their own names, the last bulwark of their identity, hoping that not everything is lost, that the sparkle inside them can still light up the fire inside them.
Anyway, that's not all. It's not "okay, now we know: good luck, kids". It's not just their business. It's ours. And our responsibility is much harder than what we can imagine: we don't have to teach them what to do, we don't want to let them learn how to be like us, the children being photocopies of the parents. We are here in the world to make it better: and we have to explain them they can resist to our chronic sclerosis, that they have to rebel against the cult of human government and the selfishness and greed disguised as civic pride, that they deep inside are able to look beyond the appearance, the institutional affairs and the petty nationalisms.
Finally, we have to teach them not to be like us. To tell us "No". That's the hardest task. In China with Wei Yi as everywhere else.
(for the images of all the 11 Artworks, download the file - text in Italian)
| weiyikids.pdf |
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On Kawara - Thanatophanies
2011.02.01
2011.02.01
Thanatophanies is the only one portfolio of engravings made by On Kawara. This cycle of thirty Artworks has been conceived between 1955 and 1956, for a book originally entitled Death Masks (Shikamen), but finally it was published in a very limited edition only forty years later, in 1995, when this unfinished set of Japanese Portraits acquired a more universal meaning, condensed in the new title, Thanatophanies. Placing each one of these "appearances” under the invocation of the Greek god of death gives them a mythical dimension, an appearance of fate, linking the nightmare of the atomic era and the cold war, whose these figures are the very expressions, to the global fears of the end of the century. The strength of this very early repertory, constituted of monstrous heads where all that humanity generated as congenital malformations is condensed in a genetical apocalypses, is sharpen by the terrific drawing skill of One Kawara, normally known for his conceptual work. Its quasi photographic verism - some of these figures have been actually inspired by photographs - was indeed also an artistic answer to the generalization of the mechanical techniques of reproduction: one could say that the artist tried here, for the first time, to use what we later came to call Print-Painting.
International Public Exhibitions:
Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (DE)
Mamco - Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva (CH)
Académie de Grenoble, Grenoble (FR)Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe, Baden Karlsruhe (DE)
Fondation pour l'Art Contemporain Salomon, Alex (FR)
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The Girl in the Picture
2011.01.01
2011.01.01
I guess you saw this photo somewhere. Everyone did. Probably you don't know neither who took it nor where. Perhaps you don't know who this girl is, and why she and the other people with her are screaming so bad - you see they are running away from smoke or something, and there are soldiers behind them, it surely means nothing good at all.
This picture was taken on June 8th, 1972 by 21 y.o. photographer Nick Ut: a naked young girl is running toward the camera to flee a South Vietnamese napalm attack on the Trảng Bàng village during the Vietnam War. The girl was the then 9-years-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc, who was taken by the photographer himself to the hospital right before delivering the film, and whose life has been traced in 1999 by Denise Chong in the biography "The Girl in the Picture: the Story of the Story of Kim Phúc, the Photograph and the Vietnam War".
Right after the publication by the Associated Press, delayed by a concern for frontal nudity which has been overridden thanks to the news value, this photo became the international symbol of fight against the Vietnam war, and finally earned Ut the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Thirty years later, the photographer himself declared:
"The photo was as authentic as the Vietnam war itself. The horror of the Vietnam war recorded by me did not have to be fixed. That terrified little girl is still alive today and has become an eloquent testimony to the authenticity of that photo".
This very photo was given by Ut as a present to his colleague Sandy Colton (1925 - 2008): it is an extremely rare vintage print, with a dedication (first written in pencil, then, as the result was almost invisible, in rollerball), and it comes directly from the estate.
We have chosen this pic as our manifesto as it unquestionably is one of the most perturbing photos ever shot. When there is a war, that's more or less the result, escape pain desperation oppression etc, let alone corpses. We have chosen it as this is an image everyone should see everyday at home, hanging on the wall.
We are pleased to quote Italian novelist, semiotician and philosopher Umberto Eco, interviewed by Fabio Fazio on Oct. 31st, 2010:
"Odio l'ipocrisia. C'e' della gente che se gli fai vedere un bambino africano che sta morendo di fame con la faccia coperta di mosche, ti dice 'Ma perche' mi fai vedere ste cose? Lo sappiamo che c'e' la miseria in A(frica)... Lasciami qui.' Eh no. Devi guardarlo. Io una volta avevo proposto che se esistono le condanne a morte devono essere fatte in televisione alle otto di sera mentre la gente mangia. Dice 'Poi vomitiamo'. Benissimo! Ma almeno vedi cosa vuol dire ammazzare una persona."
[I hate hypocrisy. If you show to people a starving African child with the face covered by flies, many will object: 'Why are you showing us these things? We know there is indigence in A(frica)... Don't bother me'. No. You have to see it. Once, I suggested that death sentences should be broadcasted on TV at 8 p.m. at dinner time. 'But then we puke'. Very well! At least you see what killing a person means]
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This picture was taken on June 8th, 1972 by 21 y.o. photographer Nick Ut: a naked young girl is running toward the camera to flee a South Vietnamese napalm attack on the Trảng Bàng village during the Vietnam War. The girl was the then 9-years-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc, who was taken by the photographer himself to the hospital right before delivering the film, and whose life has been traced in 1999 by Denise Chong in the biography "The Girl in the Picture: the Story of the Story of Kim Phúc, the Photograph and the Vietnam War".
Right after the publication by the Associated Press, delayed by a concern for frontal nudity which has been overridden thanks to the news value, this photo became the international symbol of fight against the Vietnam war, and finally earned Ut the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Thirty years later, the photographer himself declared:
"The photo was as authentic as the Vietnam war itself. The horror of the Vietnam war recorded by me did not have to be fixed. That terrified little girl is still alive today and has become an eloquent testimony to the authenticity of that photo".
This very photo was given by Ut as a present to his colleague Sandy Colton (1925 - 2008): it is an extremely rare vintage print, with a dedication (first written in pencil, then, as the result was almost invisible, in rollerball), and it comes directly from the estate.
We have chosen this pic as our manifesto as it unquestionably is one of the most perturbing photos ever shot. When there is a war, that's more or less the result, escape pain desperation oppression etc, let alone corpses. We have chosen it as this is an image everyone should see everyday at home, hanging on the wall.
We are pleased to quote Italian novelist, semiotician and philosopher Umberto Eco, interviewed by Fabio Fazio on Oct. 31st, 2010:
"Odio l'ipocrisia. C'e' della gente che se gli fai vedere un bambino africano che sta morendo di fame con la faccia coperta di mosche, ti dice 'Ma perche' mi fai vedere ste cose? Lo sappiamo che c'e' la miseria in A(frica)... Lasciami qui.' Eh no. Devi guardarlo. Io una volta avevo proposto che se esistono le condanne a morte devono essere fatte in televisione alle otto di sera mentre la gente mangia. Dice 'Poi vomitiamo'. Benissimo! Ma almeno vedi cosa vuol dire ammazzare una persona."
[I hate hypocrisy. If you show to people a starving African child with the face covered by flies, many will object: 'Why are you showing us these things? We know there is indigence in A(frica)... Don't bother me'. No. You have to see it. Once, I suggested that death sentences should be broadcasted on TV at 8 p.m. at dinner time. 'But then we puke'. Very well! At least you see what killing a person means]
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