Beauty and Violence: Kinbaku, The Art of Japanese Rope Bondage

Yoshitoshi, Lives of Modern People - Muraoka

There is a vogue right now for a practice called Kinbaku or Japanese Rope Bondage. It involves a mainly public display of clothed and naked women being tied in elaborate ways with metres and metres of natural rope, bound, wound and knotted into tortuous configurations and often suspended above the ground. The interest in this particular fetish has breached the normal boundaries of niche pornography and entered the sphere of contemporary art and culture, whilst sidestepping the obvious bourgeois objections to the objectification, not to say public humiliation of women. The exact status of Kinbaku is hard to quantify; a Google search will lead you to as many porn sites as art galleries or festivals of mind and body… so what, if anything, is there to find in this practice other than titillation?

Kunichika, 100 Roles of Baiko - Okiku

Most fetishes gain cultural credibility from association (with someone or something avante-garde or famous in an intellectually respectable field), or historical pedigree. Kinbaku has a little of both, although these credentials, as we shall see, are somewhat misplaced. Looking at the two woodblock prints on this page (available from Toshidama Gallery) and comparing them to a contemporary bondage photograph, there seems to be a direct correlation between the nineteenth and the twenty-first century imagery but I think that this connection is tenuous and manipulated. The prints depict different heroines albeit in identical poses. The print above, by Yoshitoshi, is an historical print showing the maid Muraoka tortured by the state for supporting Nationalist revolt in 1858. The print on the right by Kunichika, depicts the servant Okiku suspended in a well by her wicked employer for allegedly breaking a valuable plate,

A Victorian corset

a role played by Onoe Baiko in the play of the subject where he takes the female role. The Baiko seems to me to be absent of the sexual suggestiveness inherent in the former image. There is an argument that prints such as the Yoshitoshi give historical precedence to the modern practice of Kinbaku, but this is not quite the whole case. Some men have always been fond of packaging and tying up women. The photograph to the left is of an English woman in a corset from roughly the same date as the two prints (late nineteenth century). Admirers of Kinbaku suggest that the art of rope bondage is intimately associated with the aesthetic of the Japanese and their delight in packaging, containing, nature. Examples might be the tightly bound food in bento boxes or origami or the formal tying of kimono or ceremonial wear; but then when one examines the extremely complex knotting of an English admiral’s dress uniform or the lacing of a woman’s corsets, the cultural argument becomes less convincing.

Modern Kinbaku

I’m being coy here… there is clearly a pornographic (and sadistic/violent) element to Japanese rope bondage, but there is also a beauty and formality to it as well. It is understandable that cultured people should be attracted to restrained (and restraining) practices which create a tension between nature and discipline. There is the same aesthetic at work in eighteenth century formal gardens or romantic neo-classical painting. It becomes problematic I think, when the enthusiasm for the exotic, clouds judgement about the real content, motive or effect that an image or a performance might suggest.

Yoshitoshi, The Lonely House on Adachi Moor

A few prints by Taiso Yoshitoshi are probably the only example of Japanese bondage that I can think of that predates the Second World War – it simply does not exist as a sexual motif in Japanese art or imagery prior to that. Most people are familiar with shunga (the japanese art of explicitly pornographic woodblocks) but shunga rarely illustrates sexual acts beyond the relatively conventional and certainly not bondage in any form. From that alone, one would have to conclude that the sexualized binding of women was no part of Japanese consciousness at all… apart from the case of Yoshitoshi. Perhaps one of the greatest and most disturbing images of Japanese art is Yoshitoshi’s vertical diptych The Lonely House on Adachi Moor. Here we see a heavily pregnant girl, tied and bound and suspended by her feet with a hag sharpening a blade beneath her. There is some resemblance here to contemporary Kinbaku imagery, but there is none of the fastidious attention paid to knots and ties, and it has to be borne in mind that Yoshitoshi is known to have been a singularly disturbed individual even to his own contemporaries – not for nothing is the standard text on the artist subtitled Beauty and Violence.

If not from Edo culture then, where does the current vogue for ritual, sexualised binding originate? Many people claim that Kinbaku is derived from Hojojutsu, a sophisticated method of restraint, used for the transportation, exchange and confinement of prisoners of both sexes during the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan. There is something to be said for the argument that the Japanese have a tradition of binding and wrapping, but the complex system of ropes and ties used in Hojojutsu most likely came about through the necessity of rapid prisoner exchange at borders and the need in such a  hierarchal society as Edo Japan to mark the difference between different classes of prisoner and different genders. It was not until the early twentieth century that Seiu Ito, (credited with being the effective inventor of Kinbaku) whilst researching Hojojutso happened upon the idea of refining it into a sexual aesthetic. His personal obsession with Yoshitoshi led him to subject his pregnant wife to the tortures depicted in the print of the Lonely House and his subsequent photographic and drawn depictions really form the basis of the entire practice. The vogue for Kinbaku took hold in America in the 1950’s where a combination of the mystery of the East and traditional misogyny have made it popular with both pornographers and BDSM aficionados.

1950's Kinbaku

It is a complicated history of half truth and fact. Some people, feminists especially, will find the practice and depiction deeply offensive, others will see a discipline and otherness that they find inspiring and some will see a powerful sexual stimulus… either way, it seems there’s no great sexual tradition for this in Japan, although the originator of the entire movement, by default turns out to be Taiso Yoshitoshi after all and his troubled relationship with beauty and violence.

I recently had the pleasure of having dinner with Midori, one of the leading exponents of Kinbaku in the west. Half Japanese herself, she acknowledges the sexual element as well as the ritualised nature of the practice and uses men and women in her performances. For anyone interested in exploring the subject more, I recommend both her books on the subject and her website, which can be found at Planet Midori.

Nigao – True Likeness in Japanese Prints

Toyokuni, Drawing Actor Likenesses

How important is a likeness in a work of art? Maybe not as important as it seems; elsewhere on this site we’ve looked at how potentially disastrous it would be to use Hiroshige’s 53 Stations of the Tokaido Road as a route map; and so it was for centuries that depictions of actors or warriors could not be said to be accurate likenesses – or indeed any kind of likeness at all to the subjects they are depicting. All of this was to do with conventions; the traditions of Chinese and Japanese painting, the relative importance of actors and their roles, the shifting emphasis toward celebrity and the sophistication of the woodblock medium.

Kikugoro Onoe V as Kamiyui Shinza

Kabuki is highly stylised, the performance relies on the tension between restraint (within very closely confined convention), and the controlled expression of extreme emotion – almost all kabuki theatre is after all melodrama. Principally because of censorship, a conspiracy exists between the audience and the performer – within this limited repertoire existed the potential for the greatest expression of art and emotion. This relationship extended to the woodblock artist and print-buying public. Conventions of display, pose, space, expression and costume were strict – as on the stage – and an artist’s value was dependent upon how he performed within these strict conventions. Oddly, likeness was not considered important until the end of the eighteenth century when the artist Shunso introduced it; from then on ‘true likeness’ became increasingly important. The artist Toyokuni I expanded the reach of Nigao (true likeness) in 1817 and even wrote an instruction manual about how to achieve it titled, Quick Instruction in the Drawing of Actor Likenesses (pictured above). This was a sophisticated code that conveyed the features of individual actors without breaking the convention of the kabuki face with its heavy make up and stylised expression. He stresses the importance of the nose, the eye, the mouth and the eyebrow. Portraits were almost always shown in three-quarter view rather than in profile or straight on, the artist was to draw the nose first, then the mouth, the brows, the eyes and finally the outline of the face itself.

Kunisada, Ichimura Uzaemon XIII as Tekomae Kakitsu 1862

It would be easy to dismiss this approach as mere caricature (which it can be when carried out by unskilled draughtsmen) but for Toyokuni and artists such as Kunisada there is something else going on, more complex and considered. Within these constraints, these great ukiyo artists were able to show great expression and meaning; they conveyed exquisite subtlety of emotion – longing, anger and jealousy – assisted by subtle modulations of colour and discreet embossing to the facial features. Kunisada achieved a complete ascendance of actor over character in his later portraits, necessary when it was forbidden to name actors on ukiyo prints. This push-pull, this duality between actor and role is what gives these great portraits their attraction. The role could be identified by pose, by clothing, by signifiers… an oar, a particular type of hat or stage prop. The actor by contrast was portrayed by features and by touch, and this is where Nigao is of the greatest importance.

Kunichika, Onoe Kikugoro Cherry Blossom, 1870

The pictures on this page are of the actor Ichimura Uzaemon XIII. Alongside Ichikawa Danjuro IX, he was the greatest kabuki actor of the nineteenth century. His exceptionally long career meant that he was pictured countless times between 1859 and 1894 by the most prominent artists of the century. Like so many kabuki actors he was known by many different names, the most famous being Baiko, (Onoe Baiko) and Onoe Kikugoro V. Despite the very varied roles that he played – unusually, both male heroes (tachiyaku) and onnagata (female roles) – we can see how artists such as Kunisada and Kunichika (illustrated) kept a recognizable consistency with his features despite the need to exaggerate his image for the sake of the role or the excessive make up that the part (or his advanced age) required. We are fortunate to also have a photograph of Kikugoro from the middle of his long career.

Kunichika, 100 Roles of Baiko, 1893

The wonderful early portrait by Kunisada shows Uzaemon at the age of eighteen playing astreet tough, (the tattoo sleeve is a painted silk sheath that the actor would slide over his arm). Contrast that with the late portrait of the onnagata role (female) with inset birds and the facial features are all instantly recognizable – the thin downturned mouth, the blocky, slightly elongated head and the prominent chin. Compare these two images with the two photographs of the actor and whilst the likeness is good, the artists have exaggerated certain characteristics to create an image… a persona if you like, that stands in for the actor in print. Remarkably, these beautiful portraits have achieved a perfect balance of two tricky things – creating a likeness and projecting a character in role, something that in its subtlety far exceeds the demands of mere caricature – or portraiture for that matter.

Onoe Baiko in old age

Kunisada: The Later Actor Portraits runs at the Toshidama Gallery until 2nd March, 2012.

In Advance of Kunisada

Kunisada at Toshidama Gallery

Toshidama Gallery is showing the later actor portraits of Utagawa Kunisada from the 20th of January. Art historians and art critics talk about artists having a ‘coherent body of work’, and sitting here in the office at the gallery, looking at twenty-two of these ukiyo prints I am struck, possibly for the first time, by how consistent Kunisada’s output was in the last fifteen years of his life. These prints shimmer with deluxe technique, not in a vulgar or flashy way, but restrained and considered. Each print whilst consistent with its fellows is also unique and brilliantly conceived. The street tough displays his richly tattooed arms with his own bravura gesture in marked contrast to the diffidence of the strolling Hanbei or the various tragic or evil Onnagata.

The bulk of these late portraits are set against Kunisada’s richly dark charcoal backgrounds, his use of shade and tone, particularly in the two standing figures in the Yoshiwara is outstanding, as is his subtle use of burnt orange and midnight blue. In this late body of work, densely packed together on the office walls here, I am struck by how considered an artist he is, how his artistic vision is so focussed and yet continually inventive, even when he is appropriating existing tropes and conventions from the past. It has always been easy to dismiss Kunisada as being too profligate with his work, and there is a case for arguing that when his studio was at its peak in the 1830’s and 40’s that some of the output was sloppy. These later portraits seem to me to dismiss that notion. Here we see a mature and confident artist in his prime. There is a deep knowledge here of the pictorial form and a mastery of technique that identifies a very great artistic talent. Many of these prints (contrary to previous opinion) are the equal of the great classical period of ukiyo-e, together they reinforce how outstanding was Kunisada’s contribution to Japanese culture and to visual art as a whole.

Kunisada: The Later Actor Portraits is at the Toshidama Gallery from the 20th of January 2012. All works are for sale.

There – Not There – Woodblock Prints and the Work of Paul Morrison

Morrisson, Rhexia, 2011

In ukiyo-e, as in all prints produced from blocks, there is little margin for hesitation – no grey area for the artist to prevaricate. In relief printing at its most basic, there is only the presence of a mark (black or colour on a white ground) or the absence of a mark (white on a black or coloured ground); in other words a thing is either there or not there. It is within this convention of positive and negative that the artist has to work. Western art in contrast to art of the East, has so often been concerned with shades, with transitions and shadows… what lies between a thing and another thing, rather than the thing itself. This liminal convention has its roots not only in the West’s obsession with finessing, (a subject or an idea) but in the evolution of fresco and easel painting in the middle ages – two media that lend themselves to gradation, subtlety and continuity of surface. Western art is slippery – evasive in its margins – compared to the tradition of the East which draws much more upon gesture and the moment and all that that implies. In intaglio printing as a whole (and I’m not including advanced technique here) there is little space for manoeuvre in the edges, the shades or the transitions of a mark.

Conventionally, scale determines the relative distance from the picture plane of the thing depicted… the further away an object is, the smaller it will be – we determine relative space between objects according to relative size. In black and white block prints, this is pretty well the only way to ‘open’ the depth of field in the picture. Scale has not always been determined this way; before the Renaissance, scale was determined by importance – that is, the importance of the figures or the action in the scene – this of course played havoc with realism and the illusion in the picture. In the twentieth century, less importance than ever was given to realism and yet in painting, emphasis remains rooted in easel painting conceits albeit in different forms.

The work of the international contemporary artist Paul Morrison very nicely plays with these issues of scale and of immediacy without obligation to convention. His mainly black and white wall pieces display no hesitation and give little clue to what might happen between the spaces of these huge constructions. Denying himself the luxury of the broken edge, Morrison’s work, grandly scaled though it is, shows a marked resonance towards the uncompromising scenic depictions of Hiroshige, particularly in his ishizuri landscapes of the 1840’s.

Morrison has recently completed a large scale block print, conceived and commenced as a woodblock in the traditional manner and executed (albeit in lino) by skilled Japanese woodblock carvers. The piece is enormous for a single sheet print, measuring over 38 by 50 inches; what is interesting for us, from the perspective of the ukiyo-e scene and what came later, is its freshness, its visual vocabulary and its power to play so elegantly with space using so few available means.

Hiroshige, Ishizuri Landscape, 1840's

Looking at the Hiroshige landscape of 1840, one is struck by the relative scale of the things depicted; there is a deliberacy about the juxtaposition of the small foreground masts and the vast, looming presence of Fuji that dominates the scene. How entertaining that in the Morrison, using the same visual means, one is also struck by the scale of things… however here the scale is inverted; the vastness of the foreground carnation against the discreet mountains that just break the horizon. Curiously both pieces abide by the conventional rule of relative scale. In the case of the contemporary piece we are peering through the foreground plants at the diminished, distant scene whereas in the Hiroshige the artist has allowed the mountain to dominate, albeit inversely to the basic principles of distant things. Both pieces achieve the same end through opposite means. Inverse too is the solidity that we should expect. The ukiyo print is a negative, one is persistently trying to reverse the image to release it into conventional daytime lighting (this print really doesn’t want to be a moonscape). Morrison’s print is also partially inverted – the sun is a black disk and in both cases we want to ‘put the picture right’. The effect of this ambiguity is to create a visual tension – remember the means and the medium that leave no room for uncertainty; how can something so sure be so uncertain?

Hiroshige, Ishizuri of Bird on a Branch

In the second example by Hiroshige, the bird against the blue background of 1840, there is a similar focus on botanical exactness. Morrison borrows from sources of botanical illustration in the same way that Hiroshige does. Hiroshige was no botanist and the detail of the branch and seeds would have been culled from popular natural history guides of the period. Both pieces are at pains to foreground the specific forms of the foliage in a way that belies naturalism in favour of descriptive graphics whilst also striving for a beauty – a poetry if you like – in the science of observation. In both prints, we the viewer are nose down in nature, aware of the twist and curl of the leaves, the roundness of the shapes and the surprising forms of the natural world. This ‘science in art’ depiction, sparse and monochrome nevertheless holds us – suspended between two worlds of subjectivity and realism. These prints are neither illustration nor poetic fantasy but somehow, cleverly holding a space between the two.

It is a joy to discover that this inherent complexity (in such an inherently inflexible medium) continues to be vital in contemporary art. There have been so many decades where woodblock prints have languished from dull subjects and pedestrian, polite execution, and one hopes that Paul Morrison continues to produce work that operates so ingeniously within such a confined visual space.

Happy New Year From Toshidama Gallery

Toshidama Gallery would like to wish all its visitors a very happy and prosperous New Year. We have been moving the gallery over the last two weeks and hence there have been fewer blog posts on this and our other site. We are glad to say that the disruption is at an end and we look forward to some new and exciting exhibitions for 2012.

The current show is on until January the 20th and we urge readers to join the Newsletter subscription list and benefit from 10% discounts on all current prints. We open the 2012 season with a great exhibition of Kunisada’s later actor portraits. We are looking primarily at the best of his actor pictures from 1850 onwards. There are some earlier prints by way of contrast but the focus of the show is on his great series of fine and deluxe pictures from the latter part of his career. As usual, we will try to show prints for all budgets and there will be notable prints for sale in every format.

We will start this year’s posts on this site with a look at the work of the important contemporary artist Paul Morrisson and his relationship to woodblock prints of the ukiyo-e style. Our e-blogger site will look at formats in woodblock prints and how they affect composition. Once again Toshidama Gallery would like to thank all its visitors and readers from 2011 for their continued interest and best wishes for 2012.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 18,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

The Pachyderm in the Room – Kuniyoshi’s Elephant

Kuniyoshi, 24 Paragons of Filial Piety: Taishun & the Elephants

The elephant has long presented artists of all genres with a problem. The elephant is exotic, clearly enormous and spectacular but in captivity it lacks the dynamism, the heroism that its reputation suggests. Very few artists have successfully represented the elephant and because of the sheer size of the animal, the great difficulty in transporting it, and before the advent of public zoos in the nineteenth century, very few people had direct access to them. The elephant has fared badly in the history of art; in Japan where the elephant assumed great importance in the adopted religion of Buddhism, the elephant was only briefly seen in the flesh until only a hundred or so years ago. It has nevertheless been important to picture it in order to complete certain apocryphal series such as The 24 Paragons of Filial Piety, a popular subject amongst ukiyo-e audiences.

Gesner, Engraving of an Elephant, 1551

It is fair to say that the Kuniyoshi attempt at an elephant (pictured above) is most probably the result of research from different sources than from direct experience. The precedents that he would have had would almost certainly have included the large number of Dutch engravings that he is known to have collected. Even these would have been unreliable, many such examples showing scant knowledge of exotic creatures such as whales, rhinoceroses, giraffes or elephants. Worse still is an example he would have been very familiar with, Hokusai’s Blind Men Examining an Elephant. This famous piece is from the 1818 volume 9 of his multi volume Manga Sketch series of books. In it is illustrated this Buddhist parable of a king asking a group of blind men to examine an elephant and report to him what the creature was like. Of course each man describes a different thing; one feels the tail and professes the elephant to be like a rope, another the side  which is like a wall, another the trunk which he describes as a snake and so on. The parable is concerned with illustrating how we each see the world according to personal experience rather than universal truth; however in this case it serves to neatly describe the problem Kuniyoshi may have faced when turning to illustrate the creature itself.

Hokusai, Blind Men examining an Elephant

Both the Dutch engraving and the Hokusai illustration lack skeletal structure; they fail to convince us of the mass of the creature; the weight, the bulk and the solidity of its body. The Hokusai, especially, is too bag-like, the Dutch example too inflatable. Kuniyoshi’s response in 1840 is an attempt at solidity – Hokusai’s formless and excess skin is gone, and yet there remains something of the elephant inflatable about the drawing. In Buddhism, the elephant represents solidity (obviously) and when pictured in white, (as here) the ability to overcome obstacles and obstructions with self belief and inner strength. Despite fumbling with accuracy, in this print Kuniyoshi has drawn the elephant with those Buddhist characteristics.

The fable illustrated is from an old Chinese collection of stories written by the scholar Guo Jujing recounting twenty-four acts of kindness by sons and daughters. In this case the virtuous Emperor Yao was seeking an heir to his kingdom and was told about a young man who was terribly abused by his stepmother’s family yet continued to tend the fields tirelessly and singlehandedly. He is assisted in this by the elephants and the birds:

Chikanobu, 24 Paragons of Filial Piety: Taishun and Elephants

The elephants come down from the mountains to plough the furrows for this young man; in the Spring you can see them line up and use their tusks to dig the earth. In the Summer the crows and magpies flock down to pull up the weeds with their beaks. Nature itself approves of his righteous attitude, especially in the face of hardship, as in the case of his impossible family situation.

The Emperor was so moved by the story that he granted the kingdom to the young man. Chikanobu fares little better than Kuniyoshi in his treatment of the same subject of 1890. An example, though, of how direct observation (of the whole animal!) can lend

Yoshitoyo, Elephant

authenticity is the picture by Yoshitoyo of an elephant in Japan being prepared for a parade. Whilst the creature still seems to owe a debt to Kuniyoshi’s precedent, the gesture, the convincing way that the animal grasps the straw and the focus of the eye suggest an intimacy born of first hand experience.