One of my first reactions, upon entering “The Incomplete Araki: Sex, Life, and Death in the Work of Nobuyoshi Araki,” an exhibition open at the Museum of Sex through August 31, 2018, was to feel ashamed. Next to a glossy image of a beautiful Japanese woman, a wall text read: “The curator and art historian Christian Kravagna has argued that Araki’s kinbaku-bi photography is particularly popular in the West precisely because it exploits outdated and racist Eurocentric notions about East Asian women: ‘obedient and erotic at the same time.’”
I have long been a fan of Araki’s photography, which has increasingly gained popularity in the West. In Japan, he is a mega celebrity. I remember the moment I fell in love with him. It was 2007. I was working for a well-known photographer, flipping through his collection of photography books, when I came upon Sentimental Journey (1971), Araki’s seminal collection of photographs of his wife, Yōko, on their honeymoon. The photographs were explicit, but they were also so beautiful. I remember wishing that a man would love me enough to capture me in the way that Araki captured Yōko — with tenderness, lust, and worship.
Whenever I encountered Araki’s work after, I considered what they might teach me about Japan’s sexual traditions and intimate spaces — themes of bondage, food, and motel sex abounded in the images. I never considered that I might be falling for racist tropes about Asian women.
This is exactly what the curators of the exhibition — Maggie Mustard, a Riggio Fellow in Art History at Columbia University, and Mark Snyder, director of exhibitions at the Museum of Sex — want visitors to the exhibition to do. Confront the controversies.
“In encountering the photographs, we thought it was important that people take a moment to break down the controversies in play rather than be surprised by them as they enter the exhibition later,” Snyder told me. “I want visitors to feel, ‘I want to learn how to break this down,’ or ‘I don’t want to see this exhibition at all.’”
Rather than detracting from the work, highlighting the criticism only made the exhibition seem exquisitely crafted, thoughtful, and even better, absolutely contemporary. It fits perfectly in the #metoo era without being dogmatic, silly, or polarizing. Consisting of dozens of large-scale prints juxtaposed with walls of smaller prints and Polaroids, along with a glass case full of almost 500 photo books Araki has published over the course of his 50-year-long career, the exhibition is sexually explicit, but never feels dirty. Instead, one feels reminded that despite Araki having many flaws, he is an absolute maverick behind the lens of a camera. As one of his models says in an interview that plays on a loop on the first of two floors of the exhibition, Araki so clearly was born to take photographs. “He is the god of photography,” she says.
And it’s true. Even as I acknowledged that Araki was a flawed human, I still could relish in his cinematic, color-filled, and joyful imagery.
“Is it worth it?” A giddy couple asked me as I left the museum. They were considering entering, but I could tell, felt slightly guilty, as if they were doing something illicit. “The name of the museum belies how serious and excellent the exhibitions are,” I wanted to tell them. Instead, I just smiled, and said, “Yes.”
To learn more about the exhibition, visit the Museum of Sex’s website.
