ABSTRACT
Starting with Ukiyoe woodblock prints, dating from the Edo period, continuing through contemporary art and subculture illustrations, it is not unusual to see images featuring violence, torture, particularly of women, and bizarre torment in Japanese art. This chapter will look at three artists active in Japanese contemporary art, comparing a common ideology, psychology and social background behind their expressions of women. Nobuyoshi Araki’s bondage photographs, Makoto Aida’s painting, ‘Dog’, in which a girl has had her lower limbs amputated, a lead and collar placed around her neck and is made to walk like a dog, and Fuyuko Matsui, ‘Engraved Altar of Limbs’, depicting a woman stepping forward in a forest spreading dismantlement and dissolution in insanity, holding lilies in her hands. The first two share a form of extreme desire, deviant love, while the third is an analogy of redemption – dissolution of one’s own body – and a rejoining. As a woman herself, Matsui exposes women’s bodily organs as a form of defiance towards the viewpoint of male artists who destroy and deform women’s bodies as objects or dolls, but her politics only serve to excite the sexual desires of the viewer, ironically creating vicious circles. This chapter considers Bourdieu’s writings on symbolic violence, fairness, extremism and obsession that in part underlies Japanese aesthetics, as well as physical self-projection towards the opposite sex.
