Body Art And Cyberpunk
Since the age of 17, Atsushi Tani (谷敦志, born in Osaka, Japan) has dedicated himself to photography, holding numerous solo exhibitions not only in Japan but also in the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. His work stands out for the way he approaches eroticism, focusing on the body as something that attracts yet, by revealing its inevitable decay, also repels us. His photographs are viewed by some critics as combinations of eroticism and the grotesque, influenced by body art and cyberpunk. Perhaps for this reason, his models are placed in unnatural poses, with distorted proportions and limbs replaced by doll parts, as a result of the constant manipulation of the human form.
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Hans Bellmer And Pierre Molinier
In Atsushi Tani's work, if the body is rearticulated through the juxtaposition of flesh, objects, and textures, photography—through framing and the choice of lenses, such as wide-angle—does not just distort the human figure but also places it in contrast to the space it occupies. The relationship between the body and space ultimately reveals tensions between attraction and repulsion, beauty and horror, life and death, as the artist, by displacing the human body from its natural state, presents it as something beyond biological functionality, always at the mercy of the artist’s creative forces. Thus, when looking at Atsushi Tani's photographs, it is inevitable to recall Hans Bellmer and Pierre Molinier, whose works explore human anatomy through disarticulation, mutilation, and recombination. In this sense, the presence of kinbaku in Atsushi Tani's photographs points to the fragility of the body through the imposition of limits created by the rope, which breaks the familiarity of the body by creating visual patterns that simultaneously imprison and adorn, stabilize and deform. Like structures in constant mutation, the body, as in the works of Hans Bellmer and Pierre Molinier, reveals its fragility at the moment the artist exposes its vulnerability through the tension created by the frailty and rigidity with which these poses are photographed.
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Useless Expenditure
The concept of useless expenditure, proposed by Georges Bataille, defines eroticism as inseparable from sacrifice and loss, as it involves the transgression of limits imposed on the body and life, at the moment when death emerges as true continuity. In Atsushi Tani's photographs, this principle of waste manifests in the way bodies are immobilized, fragmented, or distorted to the point of losing their functionality. Kinbaku and photographic collage are examples of this process, as the body is subjected to a control aimed at the loss of its integrity and representation, as can be seen in the retrospective of works that Atsushi Tani produced inspired by the writings of Georges Bataille.
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Click HERE for an article on the work of the transgressive photographer Joel-Peter Witkin
