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Matsui Fuyuko: Becoming Friends With All The Children Of The World
1000 limited, artist signed, new bonus plate, hard bound book with special silver glit edges, all plates by Hi-Definition FM screen printing.
- GenresArt
218 pages, Hardcover
First published August 30, 2013
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May 12, 2016
Eisnein's No.8 Favorite Artist/Artbook. Check Out No.9 Right HERE. Go Back to No.1 HERE.
Hey look... more crazy shit. More crazy, beautiful, brilliant shit. When I first discovered these works, I was initially surprised that the artist behind all this unsettling imagery was a young female Grad student. Not shocked, by any means -- I can rattle off a long list of women who are crafting some of the darkest and most compelling art I've seen -- but for whatever reason, I wasn't expecting it. That knowledge did alter the context in which I saw the work, however. The elements that struck me as deliberately salacious and perhaps exploitive when I thought it was the work of an older male artist, now seemed even darker, taking on suggestions of self-portraiture... and pitch-black autobiographical detail.
I'll just say it and let it lie: Matsui Fuyuko is a genius. Her long-time supporter and publisher, Editions Treville, keeps her in good company, other favorites of mine like Zdzislaw Beksinski, Takato Yamamoto, and Suehiro Maruo. She deserves a much wider audience, although I've been getting a 'feeling', based on random mentions on art-related sites and an over-clocked dowsing wand I custom adapted for zeitgeist sensitivity, that awareness of her tradionally crafted and elegantly disturbing 'nihonga' paintings are bleeding into the mainstream. Tenmyouya Hisashi, for example, a popular and slightly older peer of Matsui, has since incorporated nihonga into his 'Samurai Nouveau' mash-up aesthetic. [The 'nihonga' method involves painting onto gold-backed silk, and the beauty of the presentation almost threatens to distract from the subject matter, if it wasn't such a shocking contrast.]
Images of a naked woman in various stages of decomposition are an update of a medieval Buddhist sutra, 'The Nine Stages of Decay', referred to as the 'kusōzu'. Based on the “Kusōzukan”, a scroll made in the Kamakura Period (1192-1333), it's a story about a woman who sacrifices herself in front of a young monk who is sexually attracted to her; she demands he watch as her nude form stiffens, bloats, splits, erupts with maggots and beetles, and is finally reduced to bones. By seeing her body for the base and corruptible thing it is, his pre-occupation with sex is overcome. Nice of her to help him out with that... I guess. Wouldn't it have been easier on both parties if the monk castrated himself? Less balls, more Buddha. And the girl could just not die, and go about being hot in peace. A corpse-free solution. I imagine the priests thought the story about a pretty girl killing herself just to help a monk sort out his spiritual hang-ups would be more appealing to potential converts than the self-castration.
There are so many disturbing aspects to that story that it's almost impossible to isolate the main ones. For Matsui, it is no doubt the pervasive fear in Japanese culture of female sexuality, although it's certainly not limited to Japan. Her answer to the kusōzu is also a rejection -- the poignancy and beauty her unnamed woman retains in every stage of decomposition. Beauty has always been about acceptance... what we accept and what we reject.
I suspect one of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's co-founders -- John Everett Millais -- provided further inspiration with his imagining of youth and beauty corrupted by a Hamlet-induced madness and despair, 'Ophelia':
“I did get inspiration from kusōzu, but I don’t agree with the Buddhist way of thinking. I think the kusōzu was originally used to teach men that even beautiful women can decay, so they should give up such carnal desires. This way of thinking is very male-centered and I feel an aversion to it. In Shinto, too, I think concepts such as not allowing menstruating females to go through a shrine, and so on, are rather meaningless today. So I tried to paint a new kusōzu — from a female point of view.” (The quote is from the artist, and was taken from an article on the website 'The Japan Times'; the address is: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2... )
There is a recurring theme in her work of the beautiful woman, always naked, who has been grievously, fatally wounded. Her knowledge of anatomy is evident in 'Scattered Deformities in the End', with its lush, eerily elegant depiction of a woman chased by dogs and birds, pulling at the strips of flesh and muscle that hang from her exposed body; and in 'Engraved Altar of Limbs' (above), a woman is disembowelled, loops of large intestine and other viscera lie in the dirt beside her, an unsettling, dreamy smile making the scene so much worse. She explores the same, grisly subject matter with 'Light Indentations Mingle and Run in All Directions'(below, 1st illustration). While she is a master of melding hauntingly provocative brutality with an otherworldly beauty, she also produces more restrained figurative works, some of them almost abstract. Need I say this is highly recommended for "All the Children of the World", children of all ages... except, like... actual children? I need not. ;-)
Eisnein's No.8 Favorite Artist/Artbook. Check Out No.9 Right HERE. Go Back to No.1 HERE.
More Art-book Reviews
More Comic-book Reviews
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Hey look... more crazy shit. More crazy, beautiful, brilliant shit. When I first discovered these works, I was initially surprised that the artist behind all this unsettling imagery was a young female Grad student. Not shocked, by any means -- I can rattle off a long list of women who are crafting some of the darkest and most compelling art I've seen -- but for whatever reason, I wasn't expecting it. That knowledge did alter the context in which I saw the work, however. The elements that struck me as deliberately salacious and perhaps exploitive when I thought it was the work of an older male artist, now seemed even darker, taking on suggestions of self-portraiture... and pitch-black autobiographical detail.
I'll just say it and let it lie: Matsui Fuyuko is a genius. Her long-time supporter and publisher, Editions Treville, keeps her in good company, other favorites of mine like Zdzislaw Beksinski, Takato Yamamoto, and Suehiro Maruo. She deserves a much wider audience, although I've been getting a 'feeling', based on random mentions on art-related sites and an over-clocked dowsing wand I custom adapted for zeitgeist sensitivity, that awareness of her tradionally crafted and elegantly disturbing 'nihonga' paintings are bleeding into the mainstream. Tenmyouya Hisashi, for example, a popular and slightly older peer of Matsui, has since incorporated nihonga into his 'Samurai Nouveau' mash-up aesthetic. [The 'nihonga' method involves painting onto gold-backed silk, and the beauty of the presentation almost threatens to distract from the subject matter, if it wasn't such a shocking contrast.]
Images of a naked woman in various stages of decomposition are an update of a medieval Buddhist sutra, 'The Nine Stages of Decay', referred to as the 'kusōzu'. Based on the “Kusōzukan”, a scroll made in the Kamakura Period (1192-1333), it's a story about a woman who sacrifices herself in front of a young monk who is sexually attracted to her; she demands he watch as her nude form stiffens, bloats, splits, erupts with maggots and beetles, and is finally reduced to bones. By seeing her body for the base and corruptible thing it is, his pre-occupation with sex is overcome. Nice of her to help him out with that... I guess. Wouldn't it have been easier on both parties if the monk castrated himself? Less balls, more Buddha. And the girl could just not die, and go about being hot in peace. A corpse-free solution. I imagine the priests thought the story about a pretty girl killing herself just to help a monk sort out his spiritual hang-ups would be more appealing to potential converts than the self-castration.
There are so many disturbing aspects to that story that it's almost impossible to isolate the main ones. For Matsui, it is no doubt the pervasive fear in Japanese culture of female sexuality, although it's certainly not limited to Japan. Her answer to the kusōzu is also a rejection -- the poignancy and beauty her unnamed woman retains in every stage of decomposition. Beauty has always been about acceptance... what we accept and what we reject.
I suspect one of the original Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's co-founders -- John Everett Millais -- provided further inspiration with his imagining of youth and beauty corrupted by a Hamlet-induced madness and despair, 'Ophelia':
“I did get inspiration from kusōzu, but I don’t agree with the Buddhist way of thinking. I think the kusōzu was originally used to teach men that even beautiful women can decay, so they should give up such carnal desires. This way of thinking is very male-centered and I feel an aversion to it. In Shinto, too, I think concepts such as not allowing menstruating females to go through a shrine, and so on, are rather meaningless today. So I tried to paint a new kusōzu — from a female point of view.” (The quote is from the artist, and was taken from an article on the website 'The Japan Times'; the address is: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2... )
There is a recurring theme in her work of the beautiful woman, always naked, who has been grievously, fatally wounded. Her knowledge of anatomy is evident in 'Scattered Deformities in the End', with its lush, eerily elegant depiction of a woman chased by dogs and birds, pulling at the strips of flesh and muscle that hang from her exposed body; and in 'Engraved Altar of Limbs' (above), a woman is disembowelled, loops of large intestine and other viscera lie in the dirt beside her, an unsettling, dreamy smile making the scene so much worse. She explores the same, grisly subject matter with 'Light Indentations Mingle and Run in All Directions'(below, 1st illustration). While she is a master of melding hauntingly provocative brutality with an otherworldly beauty, she also produces more restrained figurative works, some of them almost abstract. Need I say this is highly recommended for "All the Children of the World", children of all ages... except, like... actual children? I need not. ;-)
Eisnein's No.8 Favorite Artist/Artbook. Check Out No.9 Right HERE. Go Back to No.1 HERE.
More Art-book Reviews
More Comic-book Reviews
More Novel Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review