Visual Culture Blog

Yurie Nagashima, Kazoku, 1993

In a previous blog post, I wrote about the photographer Yurie Nagashima whose photographs of herself and her family in the nude instigated a dramatic shift in Japanese visual culture. After exhibiting her phenomenally successful Kazoku series in 1993, Nagashima continued to interrogate photographic subjects related to gender, sexuality, representation and the body.

Yure Nagashima, Onion Boob and Sarah Lucas, Self-portrait with Fried Eggs, 1996

In one photograph, she holds an onion in front of her left breast while holding her t-shirt up by her teeth. This form of visual allegory and humorous photographic intervention locates Nagashima alongside artists such as Sarah Lucas who, in one photograph, placed two fried eggs in situ of her breasts. In the case of Lucas, the reference to female fertility and reproductive organs signified by the eggs is clear. In Nagashima’s case however, the onion is more difficult to locate since it does not immediately signify either the male or the female body. Instead, the onion might refer to the trope of perfectibility: the emphasis on aesthetic perfection of fruit and vegetable that is common in Japanese department stores. The perfect watermelon, the perfect carrot, the perfect onion, is, above all, determined by its symmetrical and even visual appearance. Nagashima’s photograph appears to question, even ridicule, this paradigm closely associated with consumerism and the representation of gender. Here, I am referring to consumerism in an economic sense but also consuming food as metaphor for consuming the female body. The onion thus functions as a pun on consuming and being consumed: in contrast to the soothing milk of the mother’s breast, Nagashima purposefully chooses a vegetable known not only for it’s acidic taste, but also, for causing tears. The unpeeling of the onion, and the allegorical pain associated with it, becomes the complete antithesis to the warmth associated with the mother.

Another photograph in which she has painted her breasts in the shape of two cartoon characters suggests that Nagashima’s preferred subject is her own body. Here, the body is not a neutral canvas or a corporeal ground zero, rather, the body functions as a potentially humorous even uncontrollable form explored by the camera. The physical act of taking a self-portrait is more closely located within the realm of performance art as Nagashima interrogates a corporeal and spatial interior by turning the camera on herself. In other words, the intervention takes places in Nagashima’s personal sphere via her body, while the camera acts as documentary device. Similar to the onion photograph, the cartoon characters serve as a visual pun that also acts to defamiliarize body parts. The cartoon characters have the effect of setting the photograph off from the classical iconography of the Nude and enabling it instead to act as asignifier for specific bodily functions. The defamiliarization of body parts also acts to desexualize the body as a whole. This visual methodology is perhaps most apparent in This Time, where Nagashima makes another direct gender specific reference to a bodily function. In his concept of the ‘grotesque body’, the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin argued that references to bodily excrement can act as a powerful device to invert a hegemonic social order. The allegorical blood on the floor situates the body outside of stereotypical representations of the body in mass media, consumer culture or pornography, placing it instead within a discourse of necessity and privacy.

Yurie Nagashima, This Time

It is ironic that as much Nagashima explores narratives of private life in her photographs, she was herself in the meantime turned into a celebrity figure in Japan. For a period of time in the mid-1990s, newspapers, magazines, TV chat shows, and the so-called ‘wide shows’, relentlessly pursued Nagashima in hopes of featuring the up-and-coming artist in their programming. With the emergence of a number of women photographers in a relatively short time period, from 1993 until about 1996, critics referred to Nagashima as a leader of a ‘girl photography boom’. Nagashima fiercely sought to distance herself from this label and, in the process, became critical of the media attention that her work has provoked.

Yurie Nagashima, Red Undwear

In as much Nagashima appears to engage in the pleasure of looking and being looked at in her photographic series Kazoku, in more recent photographs Nagashima’s gaze back to the spectator is noticeably absent. In one photograph, Nagashima’s back is literally turned towards the spectator. Viewed within the context of Nagashima’s resistance towards the increasing media attention, this gesture signifies her growing desire to be left unmediated. Even if this photograph relates to Nagashima turning away from the camera, from representation, from our gaze, she is still using her body to communicate this message. By performing to the camera, by deconstructing socially constructed gender identities, and by becoming object as much as subject of her photographs, the many bodies of Yurie Nagashima have reset the parameters of photographic discourse in her native Japan.

Please also read my post The Family Photos of Yurie Nagashima.

If you are interested in Japanese photography, please download my essay:
Marco Bohr (2011). ‘Are-Bure-Boke: Distortions in Late 1960s Japanese Cinema and Photography’. Dandelion Journal. Vol. 2, No. 2.

Shortly after the devastating earthquake and ensuing Tsunami hit the north-eastern coast of Japan, the Japanese Prime Minister Kaoto Kan addressed the assembled press in Tokyo with a brief statement expressing his sympathies to those affected by the disaster. In his short statement, Kan alludes to a deeply harbored anxiety in Japanese culture as he says the following:

“Some of the nuclear power plants in the region have automatically shut down, but there is no leakage of radioactive materials to the environment.”

This message might come to haunt Kan as conflicting news is already emerging from a nuclear power plant in Fukushima. Perhaps to avoid a panic, Kan seeks to quell the anxiety of a nuclear disaster that operates very powerfully in the only country on Earth to have suffered the explosion of an atomic bomb. Ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fears caused by this nuclear trauma are an important part of Japanese visual culture.

Akira Kurosawa, Dreams, 1990

Fictional representations of a nuclear apocalypse – now eerily reminiscent of the actual news footage emerging from the disaster zone – are a constant theme in Japanese cinema and anime. The eminent director Akira Kurosawa for instance, in his portrayal of a bizarre collection of dreamscapes, depicts Mount Fuji (an ideological symbol for the nation) surrounded by explosions and steeped in the colour red. The protagonist in Dreams (1990) wonders if there was an earthquake. No, far worse he is told, Japan was struck by a nuclear disaster.

Tokyo after ‘Third Impact’ in Neon Genesis Evangelion, 1995

Kurosawa’s post-apocalyptic vision is similarly evoked in the classic anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion by the director Hideaki Anno. The young boy protagonist ventures through a deserted Tokyo struck by a massive disaster referred to in the series as ‘Third Impact’. If the Kanto earthquake from 1923 represents the first impact, and the Allied firebombs in 1944/45 represent the second impact, the ‘Third Impact’ in Neon Genesis Evangelion refers to an event that is yet to come. First screened in 1995, Neon Genesis Evangelion stirred a deeply felt anxiety amongst Japan’s youth that the world would come to an end in the year 2000. This was partially related to the global fears of the Y2K computer virus and the popularity of Nostradamus’s predictions amongst followers of new religions.

Neon Genesis Evengelion, Episode 1, 1995

However, rather then seeking a reductive explanation for a complex set of causalities, I believe that post-apocalyptic visions in Japanese visual culture are the state’s equivalent to a psychoanalytical condition: post-traumatic stress syndrome. The disasters and ‘Third impacts’ in fictional Japanese visual culture can never be entirely disassociated with the actual experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The most famous example for the relationship between nuclear fears and Japanese visual culture remains to be the iconic Godzilla movie. First screened in 1954, in the film Godzilla was created following a nuclear detonations and acts as a powerful metaphor for nuclear weapons. Godzilla must be considered in the aftermath of Hiroshima, but also, the continued testing of nuclear weapons on the Bikini atoll from 1946 to 1958 by the Americans. In other words, Godzilla is the fictional manifestation of global arms race that was yet to peak at the height of the cold war.

Godzilla, 1954

There is no question, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan are a natural disaster. Yet the possibility of a nuclear meltdown or atomic ground zero is created by man. It is this dichotomy between man and nature that the Prime Minister of Japan maybe inadvertently evoked in his speech to the press. Man cannot control nature, but neither should an ever growing risk of a nuclear disaster control man. If the many references of a nuclear apocalypse in Japanese visual culture are anything to go by, the deeply embedded anxieties of a people should have been taken more seriously.

If you are interested in Japanese photography, please download my essay:
Marco Bohr (2011). ‘Are-Bure-Boke: Distortions in Late 1960s Japanese Cinema and Photography’. Dandelion Journal. Vol. 2, No. 2.

The kiss is a risqué subject in the cinematic cultures of India. While nudity, sex and sexual violence might pass as acceptable, it is the kiss, or the ‘smooch’ in Indian English, that is most likely to trigger government agencies to censor films. Particularly Bollywood filmmakers are fully aware of the scandalous implications of kissing scenes and openly compete for pushing the boundaries of what is permissible in visual culture. They produce films that have the longest kissing scene, the most kissing scenes, the first French kissing scene, the first open mouthed kissing scene, the first girl-on-girl kissing scene, and, most recently, the first male gay kissing scene.

First gay kissing scene in Dunno Y, 2010

All the while, producers appear to utilize the ‘scandal’ associated with the kissing scene in order to promote a film well in advance of its release. In other words, the disclosure of the kiss is a key element in the promotional structures of Indian cinema. Here, censorship is not as much prohibiting certain scenes to be screened, but rather, the existence of an ambiguous and idiosyncratic censorship law is the platform that aides the promotion of a movie.

While Bollywood has discovered that kissing scenes are a key constituent in the economic success of a Hindi language movie, other Indian film cultures based in languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Punjabi or Marathi appear to have a more innocent relationship with the kiss. Above scene from the Tamil language film Naadodigal is an example in which censorship guidelines appear to have been carefully obeyed. Despite not actually depicting the kiss in itself, this short scene from Naadodigal represents precisely the complex power relations that are at stake in the cinematic portrayal of the kiss. The innocent and slightly clueless man is lured by the female subject to give her a peck on the cheek. Here, it is clearly the woman who provokes the man into action which reflects an important gender relation in India: in court cases against films transgressing the kissing censorship guidelines, it is most likely the lead female actress that is being sued. In 2006, the Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai was sued for ‘lowering the dignity or women’ by kissing Rai Hrithik in the film Dhoom 2.

Aishwarya Rai kisses Rai Hrithik in Dhoom 2, 2006.

The guilty party is, in most cases, not the male actor kissing, or the filmmaker depicting the kiss, but the actress herself for partaking in an activity deemed obscene. At the very end of the scene in Naadodigal, the man is prevented from kissing the woman by his ‘uncle’ who, in relation to Indian culture, represents the patriarchal and goodnatured state that seeks to protect its citizens from trouble. While the ‘nephew’ represents the everyday citizen, the ‘uncle’ represents the state, and by extension, state institutions such as the Ministry of Information and Broadcastings in charge of censorship.

It would be incorrect however to assume some sort of special case in Indian visual culture for the complicated relationship between cinema and representations of the kiss. Giuseppe Tornatore’s classic film Nuovo Cinema Paradiso for instance depicts the widespread censorship of kissing scenes in Italy during the 1940s. The film tells the story of the projectionist Alfredo who is required to cut kissing scenes from American and Italian movies following the insistence of the local Catholic priest in a small town in Sicily. Having collected these censored kissing scenes for a number of decades, the film ends with a touching scene in which Toto, Alfredo’s quasi-adopted son, watches Alfredo’s vast collection of kissing scenes. The kissing scene collection acts as a powerful allegory for Alfredo’s, Toto’s and the viewer’s shared loved for the moving image. In that sense, apart from sexual innuendo, the kiss is moreover a metaphor for the viewer’s passionate relationship with the cinematic apparatus. The various records broken by Indian filmmakers of the new millennium (longest kiss, most kisses etc.) thus represent stages in the maturing relationship between Indian cinema and its increasingly desensitized spectatorship. Despite representing the world’s largest film economy, the kissing scene still constitutes the metaphorical coming-of-age of Indian cinema.

For more on this topic, please read Theorizing World Cinema edited by Lúcia Nagib, Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah.