When considering shunga, it is important to shed censorious attitudes towards sexuality that have been a fundamental part of western Christian culture for so long. A lot of the scenarios in shunga are preposterous – there’s fantasy at work.” Hokusai was working during the Edo period, which had a playful spirit, and the octopus story comes from an ancient tale about a diver woman who stole a jewel from the Dragon King’s palace at the bottom of the sea.
But this is sexually explicit art, not pornography, produced to exactly the same technical perfection as art in other formats by the same people. “People who haven’t seen shunga before will be surprised by how explicit it can be. “Today shunga gets treated like obscene pornography,” explains Timothy Clark, who has curated the British Museum’s exhibition. A copy of Hokusai’s notorious print once owned by the French connoisseur Edmond de Goncourt, who wrote a monograph about the artist, is included in the show, as well as a steamy translation of the picture’s abundant text, which contains several onomatopoeic sighs and exclamations signifying the woman’s fulfilment. But this woodblock print, which is known in the West as The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife and was created in 1814 by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), who also famously depicted a tumultuous wave apparently about to swallow up Mount Fuji, is in fact a sophisticated work of art belonging to a genre known as ‘shunga’, or erotic ‘spring pictures’, which thrived in Japan between about 16.Ī spellbinding, exhilarating and often eye-popping exhibition, Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art, collating more than 150 works of shunga, opens this week at the British Museum in London. To modern eyes, it may look like a piece of titillating filth.
As his coiling tentacles slither over her blemish-free body, caressing a nipple and encircling her nubile legs, this unlikely molluscoid lover pleasures his prostrate captive, who throws back her head in ecstasy while a second, smaller octopus plants a tender kiss upon her mouth. It is one of the most salacious images in the history of art: deep underwater, a gigantic pink octopus drags a naked young woman into a cleft between two rocks.
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