PHOTO:Nobuyioshi Araki
The solo exhibition of the famous Japanese photographer Araki. “ARAKI Ojo Shashu – Photography for the After Life: Alluring Hell” gives a distinct reflection on Araki’s oeuvre, renowned for the master’s perpetual focus on daily life and his intertwining themes of Life (Sex) and Death. The exhibition comprises both his notorious early work, as well as very recent series that have never been shown in the Netherlands before. The exhibition offers a unique and intimate insight into the perspective of an artist in the dusk of his life. Nobuyoshi Araki is one of the most celebrated Japanese artists of our time. Ever since he started his photographic career in the mid-sixties, Araki has taken tens of thousands of photographs and published more than 450 photobooks. His photographs are personal, indifferent, random, accidental, prurient, erotic, anarchistic, touching, vulgar, and sentimental. The cumulative effect is overwhelming.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: FOAM Archive
Araki is an international master of photography, noted for his seemingly detached Kinbaku-photographs, Kinbaku, (the art of tight binding), is a Japanese style of rope bondage. Simultaneously his work is very intimate and personal, often closely related to his Tokyo surroundings and to the memories of the marriage with his late wife Yoko until her death in 1990. Only by distancing himself through his lens, keeping life at an arm’s length, the artist can truly approach reality and eventually reconcile life and death. The title of the exhibition refers to the influential Japanese-Buddhist book Ōjōyōshū from 985 AD. It depicts heaven and hell, and inspires Araki in his existential exploration of Life (Sex) and Death through photography. The balance of polarities is a major thread running through the exhibition, from the far-famed series Satchin and Sentimental Journey/Winter Journey, to the numerous photobooks, to the most recent photographs: banality and spirituality, light and shadow, fact and fiction, rationality and passion, creation and destruction, seduction and decay, life and death, paradise and hell. During the past months, the 74-year-old Araki worked on his new series qARADISE, which consists of dark photographs of flowers and dolls. Moreover, he has rediscovered his never exhibited series Alluring Hell from 2008, with erotic black-and-white photographs overpainted by Araki himself. In addition, an extensive collection of fading Polaroids from the impossible series is shown. These recent series set the tone of the exhibition; they mirror Araki’s acceptance of, as well as his resistance to decline. While at first slightly alienating, in particular for the non-Japanese observer, both the individual images and the assembly of series may eventually bring about a feeling of transciency and melancholia.
Info: Foam Photography Museum, Keizersgracht 609, Amsterdam, Duration: 19/12/14-11/3/15, Days & Hours: Sun – Wed: 10:00-18:00, The – Fri: 10:00-21:00, www.foam.org
