Marvelous Tales of Black Ink
Nobuyoshi Araki
Mörel Books
Text by Simon Baker
Hardcover
108 pages
300×360 mm
ISBN: 978-1-907071-43-0
“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…”
Nobuyoshi Araki (born May 25, 1940) is a Japanese photographer and contemporary artist. Having published over 350 books by 2005, and still more every year, Araki is considered one of the most prolific artists alive or dead in Japan and around the world.
www.arakinobuyoshi.com
Mörel Books is a London based independent publisher specialising in affordable limited edition art books and booklets.
Video: Nobuyoshi Araki – Marvelous Tales of Black Ink on Vimeo.
