: art glue :: japan beneath the kimono

Let’s deal with the sex bit first. Nobuyoshi Araki, Japan’s most fanatically popular photographer, has made a name for himself in the West for tying up seminaked Japanese women in ropes, suspending them from the ceiling of his studio and then taking their portraits. Sometimes he photographs them in the gorgeous, loosely flapping folds of silk kimonos with a plastic lizard or perhaps an iguanodon creeping silently up their exposed thighs. The kinkiest — though this is debatable — is the series depicting a schoolgirl lying across a table, her knickers abandoned, a schoolboy and strawberry jam. Araki’s take on sex is rather more than a glimpse of stocking.

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