A Maverick of Japanese Photography, Bound Tight to Ritual

NEW YORK — “The Incomplete Araki” is a knowingly redundant title for an exhibition of Japan’s most prolific, most controversial and most disobedient photographer. For more than 50 years, Nobuyoshi Araki has pushed the limits of production — he has taken an uncountable number of photographs, gathered into something like 500 books — and pushed the limits, too, of free expression. He was arrested once on obscenity charges, and Japanese and foreign authorities have censored his exhibitions of Tokyo streetscapes, blossoming flowers and, most notoriously, women trussed up in the baroque rope bondage technique known as kinbaku-ki, or “the beauty of tight binding.”

Even more than his colleague DaidoMoriyama, or the slightly younger Hiroshi Sugimoto, Araki has emerged as Japan’s most famous living photographer, and the 77-year-old has been enjoying a victory lap of sorts. A major retrospective of his work took place in 2016 at the Musée Guimet, Paris’ Asian art museum. Last summer, the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum assembled hundreds of his large-scale prints, Polaroids and books; another show is up in Munich. Now he receives his largest exhibition in New York at the Museum of Sex, better known for its anatomically explicit bouncy castle and Studio-54-manqué cocktail bar than its engagement with visual art.

The Museum of Sex is a commercial enterprise, and since opening 15 years ago its exhibitions have skewed closer to mass amusements than rigorous investigations of art and intimacy. Yet Serge Becker, who joined the institution as artistic director last year, has been leading efforts to make this place into something more than a titillating tourist trap, and “The Incomplete Araki” is its boldest effort yet to present an art exhibition up to international museum standards. The Museum of Sex brought on Maggie Mustard, a specialist in Japanese photography, to organize this show (with Mark Snyder, the museum’s director of exhibitions), and “The Incomplete Araki” tangles with the photographer’s debts to Japanese literary modernism, the line between art and vulgarity, the West’s fetishization of Asian women and the power relationships between photographer and model — which, to use a word Araki will appreciate, can get very knotty.

I appreciate the effort, even if the audience here is not always overly concerned with the development of Japanese photographic style after World War II. On a recent Friday night (the museum is open until 11 p.m.), I watched young couples having a great time in front of Araki’s images, tittering at the naughtier pictures, looking closely at the sheen of a silk kimono over scratchy, taut cordage. These pictures are much more than erotica, but the curators have done their job, and hey, some museumgoers ogle David and the Venus de Milo, too.

You will know you are not in a traditional museum from the start of “The Incomplete Araki,” whose first darkened gallery contains a walk-in vaulted web of knotted rope. Four of his most explicit black-and-white images appear under a spotlight. One, dating to 1997, pictures a young woman suspended from a roof beam, her expression glacial, her hair swept into the geisha’s chignon known as the shimada, her pudenda only partly covered by a blooming tiger lily.

Bondage, however, has only been one theme of Araki’s, and this show spans his career even as it concentrates on its erotic side. It includes a few images from his early, lastingly moving “Sentimental Journey” (1971), whose small-scale prints document his honeymoon with his wife, Yoko. Araki captures her staring into space on a bullet train, lying nude on a bed and, in one of his most famous images, sleeping in a rowboat on a river in Kyushu, her checked skirt contrasting with the woven mat on the hull. He provided a wrenching coda after Yoko’s death from ovarian cancer, in 1990. We see her in a flower-strewn coffin, her face so overlit she appears an angel bound home. (You may have seen this series in “For a New World to Come,” the big photography show at Japan Society in 2015.)

There are a few excellent prints here of Araki’s densely colored floral photographs, which, in contrast to Robert Mapplethorpe’s elegant still lifes of tulips and calla lilies, take a licentious up-close view of pistils and stamens. Araki’s commercial work and celebrity editorial are also included. We see Lady Gaga, her bound wrists undergirding her raised legs, or the Icelandic pop star Björk, who waxes eulogistic about Araki in a video here. (Weirdly the show omits the Björk photographs; Araki shot the cover of her album “Telegram,” rope-free.)

And there is teeming, glorious Tokyo, whose blossoming trees and lowlife nightclubs have been his most reliable muse. If Araki has ever loved anything more than his wife, it is the megacity of 35 million, and several series intermingle nudes with prints of commuter trains, electoral posters and landmarks like Philippe Starck’s Asahi headquarters.

Still, rope is for Araki what blue paint was for Yves Klein, and at the Museum of Sex, bondage is given prominence. His tied-up models are rarely fully nude, and they usually have their eyes locked on the lens. They neither smile nor struggle. A small fraction of his photographs objectify his models, but in the vast majority the bound women are in command. His most impressive bondage pictures are shot in saturated color, but the black-and-white ones can at times feel ponderous, too much like pornography with a pedigree.

Given the subject and the locale, the curators’ wall texts in this section are models of gravity and social responsibility. They note that Araki and his models sometimes have sex, and that the models regularly speak of their “absolute consent.” (Last year, as the texts acknowledge, one model went to Facebook to allege lewd behavior by Araki on a commercial shoot in 1990.) The show also smartly includes video interviews with several models who speak of their work as consensual, fulfilling and collaborative. His intrepid model Shino explains that posing in bondage “was really like the extension of a relationship.” The model Komari uses the same analogy: “Even as a model our relationship is one of two human beings.” These women’s words are worth recalling as you look at Shino in her open kimono or when you behold Komari with her legs splayed open in front of a carmine wall. Among the many things to like about “The Incomplete Araki,” perhaps the most important is its insistence on the agency of women in the construction of these images, even amid power imbalances that can never be fully erased. Consider, too, Araki’s series “Eros of a Married Woman,” for which hundreds of everyday citizens have applied to pose. He has produced 20 of these books, displayed here amid hundreds of other publications that testify to the diversity of his titanic output.

Do I wish this show were a little larger and a more scholarly? I suppose I do. Yet in Japan, the distinction between commercial and nonprofit institutions is permeable. Artists like Araki have exhibitions in department stores, while many Japanese museums have rental spaces where artists can show their work for a price. And there need not be a shortage of exhibitions of a photographer like Araki, who treats photography as an extension of life. He once said: “My heart beats, I squeeze the shutter.”

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Event Information:

‘The Incomplete Araki: Sex, Life, and Death in the Works of Nobuyoshi Araki’

Through Aug. 31 at the Museum of Sex, Manhattan; 212-689-6337, museumofsex.com.