Picture Perfect "Shunga"

Shunga is a building of space where sexuality explodes like violence and silence, in a lack of communication between bodies and eyes. Everything appears to us as in a mechanical and burlesque show box. The performance is an almost immobile event, the bodies open and close in a rapid movement of cloths and legs. The open clothes expose the raw and monstrous nudes of the gigantic sex organs, two prostheses that present themselves as exaggerated devices in the fantasy. But nothing happens, time passes without them interpenetrating, and enjoyment is only a metaphysical hyperbole in the eyes of the beholder, a simulation suggested and never realized. What we see at the moment is a grotesque fake, something between domestic everyday and abject pornography, something that shows a certain secret routine of this strange desire that is guided by prohibition and clandestine exchanges. Pornography these days increasingly looks like a “still life”, everything is seen, everything repeats itself, but nothing happens, the enjoyment is more and more a social simulation. Our urban societies in the East and in the West have long been marked by the obsession of looking at sex, as if everything were subliminally sexual, and at the heart of this latent desire is organized the commerce of things and compulsive consumption. The exchange between people takes on an abstract ritual, always mediated by the image of sex, even when the whole image of sexuality is banished from our vision and we create this enormous taboo about our sexual organs. Ayakamay uses with feminine and transgressive intelligence this widespread fetish, often presentiating feminist activism as a frightening freedom that sheds the sexuality of relationships as a given that we are asked to see, in a non-comfortable way. We are moved from a voyeurism to an object state of the game of visibilities, showing us that whoever wishes is also the object of the game of images. Shunga, evoked here by Ayakamay, is an artistic genius of Japanese painting, emerged as an art of pleasure books where bodies are stamped in highly erotic positions, a contortionism in which we can admire the interactions between bodies: mouths, eyes, Genitals, feet and hands intertwine as erotic hallucination. A kind of secret, anonymous, and very popular art used in the education of the Gueishas and Samurai during the Edo period (1615-1868) and which persists in many ways to contemporaneity through manga and lower pornography. In classical Japanese culture, as well as for indus and buddhists, sex is part of a sacred ritual and even the gods are caught in their intercourse and erotic play. The Westernization of Japanese culture with all Christian influxes has altered this sacred dynamic and has increasingly relegated the sophisticated beauty of this eroticism to a field of the forbidden.