shashasha

Published in 2001 by Eyesencia, Araki's “Seikimatsu no Shashin” is a visual narrative embodying a physical manifestation of the artists memorial to 1999, the last year of the 20th century. Within this hardcover publication are an array of images which examine, explore and expand on Araki's ongoing photographic oeuvre of his "i-photography". Here staged images of his models roped in Kinbaku captures and references both the aesthetic importance of the tradition of Kinbaku and the play of power relations as a result. These images, placed along side snapshots of raucous nights, his models and captured landscapes of his urban surroundings, create a visual narrative enhanced through the motifs of reptilian and inanimate objects, of a landscape where fact and fiction become blurred through constant references to these subtle animisms. Here the inanimate plastic objects aid in representing the real and the imaginary, reptilian Godzilla figures and plastic bodily fragments signify his reference to both Japanese pop culture as well as traditional forms of Japanese animism; signifiers of the desires of humanity, a meeting of both the natural and artificial world which so epitomizes Araki's Tokyo.