Love & Loss: Nobuyoshi Araki’s Shi-Nikki (Private Diary) for Robert Frank
Three years after his wife Yoko Aoki-Araki died of ovarian cancer, prolific Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki assembled 101 black and white photographs as Shi-Nikki (Private Diary) for Robert Frank. The photo journal unlocks daily encounters snapped through the lens of the artist in 1992-93 and was gifted to Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank, who suffered the same bereavement of losing loved ones prematurely.
Most recently on view at Bourse de Commerce in Paris, Araki’s autobiographical approach juxtaposes the anecdotal mundanity and eroticism in his everyday life with his complex emotions and desires against the conservative Japanese society in the 1990s.
Nobuyoshi Araki, Shi Nikki (Private Diary), 1993. © Nobuyoshi Araki. Courtesy of Taka lshii Gallery. Exhibition views Galerie 3, Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection, Paris, 2021. Courtesy of Pinault Collection. Photo by Aurélien Mole.
Built in the 16th century, the Bourse de Commerce was revitalised by the hands of architect Tadao Ando in 2017-20, who transformed it into a new landmark with 10 gallery spaces dedicated to sparking dialogues amongst art lovers in the heart of Paris and drawing up a reimagination of the art experience. Bearing the commercial emblem for trade and business for centuries, the historic architecture is now adorned with contemporary art from the Pinault Collection. Its signature rotunda invites natural light from 360 degrees, illuminating the space with a touch of Parisian flair upon international artworks from Francois Pinault’s private collection dating from the 1960s through the present day. As I paced the auditorium, a grand piano sat on one side of the wall, flexing its keys and settling its mind for the evening’s recital. The black and white chromatic scheme and the absence of the pianist were transcendent and took me back to Araki’s photographs–a parallel space where love and loss meet.
Nobuyoshi Araki. © Nobuyoshi Araki. Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery.
Born in 1940 in Tokyo, Araki started off as a commercial photographer. Inspired by the rebellious spirit of the Provoke movement in Japanese photography in the 1960s, he coined the term “i-photography” and transcends his persona into the camera lens.[1] Hung on the spiral walls of a white hall in Bourse de Commerce in Paris, the 101 photographs are lined in chronological order, each dated at the bottom right corner, recounting in absolute honesty the artist’s initial 1.5 years as a widower. The interplay of images of female figures, still life, old age and funeral, the streetscape and the sky–all frozen in time and held tightly in frames–may seem fragmented. However, the inconsistency and time gap between each photograph, so much as the absence of his wife from his frames and his world, murmur the emptiness and distress he utterly experienced.
Further, the collection relives the shared memories of the artist and his late wife through motifs from two of his earlier photobooks, Sentimental Journey (1971) which records his honeymoon with Yoko and Winter Journey (1991) which documents the last days before she died. The photographs feature flowers with shadows ghosting beneath, Chiro, the cat that Araki and Yoko adopted together and lived on as the latter’s alter ego, the Tokyo alleys the couple used to stroll along, the sky that sheltered them through good and bad days, and the bodies of various women–Yoko was a model for Araki on their honeymoon photographs. Her presence in the empty space is best captured in a photograph (No. 18 dated 92.2.17) of a round bed with two pillows and a blanket rolled aside. The creases on the fabrics conjure up an image of residue intimacy, which, however, is overtaken by the current of a ticking clock that left ashore only a deserted bed. A similar composition appears in Sentimental Journey (1971) on an occasion that celebrated marriage and the couple’s sexual union. Araki concludes the 1993 photo journal with a photograph of complete blackness (No. 101 dated 93.12.31) as a silent outcry into mortality. Through the different printed episodes, he laments the departure of his wife at the concurrence of his life and the world going on as usual.
Hard to go unnoticed is the concentration and interception of photographs of female figures in the otherwise solemn collection, building a fervent narrative of Araki’s life without Yoko. As a non-conformist Araki constantly slams the notion of morality, at times in a provocative fashion, in his artistic practice. His excessively sexual photographs straddle the boundaries between art and pornography, inviting critical attention to the male gaze over the female body, particularly in an orientalist discourse. However, by no means should these images be reduced to a sexualised representation of women.[2] Quite a number of nude photographs in the portfolio exhibit the kinbaku ritual–a tight binding of the body for both aesthetic and sexual appeal, rooted in ancient Japanese culture. The submissive and seductive postures of the female models convey sadomasochistic pleasures, revealing the possibility of a transgressive lifestyle in the melancholic widowed Araki so much as Japanese women are traditionally pinned to a public image of strict propriety in a patriarchal society. These photographs accentuate the autobiographical nature of the oeuvre and do not shy from unveiling Araki’s inner beast and his lustful instincts. At a societal level, they also resonate with his tendency to challenge the taboo about the open display of the nude, presenting a way of emancipation for women through showing their sensual pleasure and retrieving the reins to their sexuality, and for the Japanese culture to liberate from its social mores towards the acceptance of human nature in full.
Full collection of 101 photographs. Gelatin silver prints, each 18.1 x 27.6 cm.
As with the artist’s prolific production, this collection should be appreciated through the richness of all its subject matters in the contexts of the artist’s private experience with his wife and as a soul revolting against a repressed culture. It is unsurprising that Araki’s works never fail to instigate debates at home and overseas. Indeed, the meaning of photography is not prescriptive from the artist nor the subject matter but derived from the act of looking and by way of talking on the part of the viewer.[3] This photography collection surrenders the persona of Araki without reservation as bait for discourses and confronting human realities in multifold. Can the conviction to love outlive the notion of death? Can the alive mourn in celebration of life and sex? Should moral principles and social constructs suppress the natural sexual instincts of human beings and such truthful expression? This collection calls for a broad reading of the photographs between gaps in totality to grasp the profundity and perhaps a state of sentimentality.
References
[1] Nobuyoshi Araki, Akiko Miki, Tomoko Sato, Yoshiko Isshiki, and Barbican Art Gallery. Nobuyoshi Araki: Self, Life, Death. London: Phaidon, 2005, 260.
[2] Christian Kravagna. "Bring on the Little Japanese Girls: Nobuyoshi Araki in the West." Third Text 13, no. 48 (1999): 65-70.
[3] Victor Burgin and Alexander Streitberger. Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin. Vol. 9. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009, 136.
Alison Lo
Contributing Writer, MADE IN BED