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Monday, November 16, 2009

Visual Art / Books Currently Hanging: Toshi Asai

Posted by Jen Graves on Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 11:28 AM

At the heart of Toshi Asai's Sakka Series I (Writer Series I) is Yukio Mishima, the explosive writer who committed ritual suicide in 1970 (after a bizarre failed coup d'etat captured on video), and who wrote the first popular modern Japanese novel (semiautobiographical) about a gay man, the 1948 book Confessions of a Mask. Mishima was an inspirational, polarizing figure. Despised by the left wing, he believed in the traditions of the samurai. He frequented gay bars, was obsessed with weightlifting, was married, had children.

Here's Asai's small, perfectly compressed version of him—coiled like a spring—dressed in blood, flowers, the nationalistic form of the rising sun represented by lines of real Japanese characters, and underlined by Asai's particular brand of gorgeous nonsense text.

Detail of Mishima Yukio, by Toshi Asai

The show is up at Kobo at Higo on Jackson through November 30.

Here's Mishima talking about the elegance and brutality of Japan.

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Man, Mishima freaks me out still. I had a college-age daydream of him and Genet getting involved in an apocalyptic argument over politics, art, criminality and eroticism. In the end they reached a fevered stalemate and had grudge sex. Bleaugh.

Posted by gloomy gus on November 16, 2009 at 12:56 PM