Marvelous Tales of Black Ink

«Marvelous Tales of Black Ink brings Araki’s language of photography and his games with words together into the same frame. The Kanji (Japanese logographic characters) painted directly and with equal intensity onto both the surfaces of explicit nudes and floral compositions raise the stakes of the symbolic associations between flowers and sexuality beyond even that proposed by Georges Bataille in his classic essay «The Language of Flowers». And although the calligraphic games that Araki plays tend often towards sexuality, they do so only in the most extraordinarily imaginative and intellectually sophisticated ways. These are word-games that would make Marcel Duchamp proud, even if they might also make him blush…»

Extract from text by Simon Baker