An exhibit with the word “sexy” in its title is bound to attract attention, but It Must Be Your Sexy Way isn’t just a tease.
The group show at Aki Gallery examines sexiness in its various guises as seen from the perspectives of 11 artists from Taiwan, China, Japan and, of all places, Austria.
Not surprisingly, photographs by three of the Japanese artists are the most provocative pieces. Nobuyoshi Araki, one of Japan’s best-known and most prolific shutterbugs, is infamous for his erotically charged images of women. Words like “pornographic” and “risque” are often used to describe his works, which nevertheless can be found in museums throughout the world.
Ten photographs have been selected to illustrate several of Araki’s artistic phases and include images of his favorite model Shino bound by rope, a couple of photographs from his Shojo Sekai (World of Girls) series, as well as a 1985 portrait of his wife Yoko Araki, who died in 1990.
The female body has been worshipped and fantasized about in different ways at different times, and the images taken by Kishin Shinoyama over the span of 40 years indicate how much things can change. Four elegant black-and-white photographs from 1970 see models in sculpture-like poses. A photo from the artist’s 2009 photo book No Nude by Kishin 2 shows porn star Akarui Kirara flashing her buttocks in a convenience store. The 69-year-old Shinoyama has been charged with indecency because many nudes from his No Nude series were shot in public locations around Tokyo.
Eroticism is varnished with a glaze of intimacy in the hands of 51-year-old Yasumasa Yonehara, an influential fashion magazine editor and celebrity photographer who takes seductive shots of young female models with his Fujifilm cheki instant camera. The women in his Polaroid-style images strike luscious poses in what appear to be private locations such as bedrooms, conveying an in-your-face attitude about sex and the female body.
In contrast to the explicit eroticism and emotional poignancy of the Japanese pieces, the artists from Taiwan and China offer an aesthetic of restraint. In Synthetic Apparatus 2 (綜合儀器2), 28-year-old Chinese painter Wang Mengfei (王孟飛) uses a palette of soft, subdued colors to render a young woman’s delicate nude body to which is affixed a mechanical device.
Taiwanese artist Hsi Shih-pin (席時斌), a trained architect, finds inspiration in algae to represent sexual organs and sexuality in his abstract paintings. On the other end of the spectrum is 23-year-old female artist Wang Wan-yu’s (王琬瑜) black-and-white documentary photography that captures real-life scenes from the private lives of 20-something Taiwanese with a poetic tincture.
Last, but by no means least, is Peter Tscherkassky’s experimental film Outer Space, a definite must-see. The Austrian avant-garde filmmaker’s 1999 tour de force deconstructs and reassembles Sidney Furie’s 1981 horror flick The Entity.
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