Eroticism And the Interweaving With Animals: The Transformation Of the Body In Chieko Minowa's Work

Biography

Chieko Minowa (箕輪千絵子), born in 1986 in Nara Prefecture, Japan, is a contemporary artist whose work explores themes such as eroticism, bodily transformation, and the fusion between human and animal. She graduated in Painting from Musashino Art University in 2009 and completed a master's degree in Printmaking from the same institution in 2012. Minowa has developed a unique visual language in graphic arts, particularly in copper engraving.

In 2008, her career gained prominence when she participated in the exhibition celebrating the centenary of Yozo Hamaguchi (ミュゼ浜口陽三, Tokyo). In 2015, she presented her solo exhibition "The Cow that Found Words" at the Shinobazu Gallery in Tokyo. Her work has also been published in catalogs and printed materials, solidifying her presence in the Japanese and international art scenes.

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Kudan

On her website, Chieko Minowa describes herself as someone who "creates works such as metal engravings, pencil drawings, pen and watercolor artworks, using the Kudan and bestial beings as motifs." The Kudan (件) is a mythical creature from Japanese folklore, characterized as a hybrid between a human and a cow. Typically, the Kudan has the body of a bovine and a human head or, in some versions, the opposite. As it symbolizes the duality between human and animal, rational and instinctive, its hybrid image is used by Minowa as a possibility to reflect on the dissolution of boundaries between self and other, through themes that point to the interconnection between nature, humanity, and the fragility of life.

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Dissolution Of Forms

Chieko Minowa's work, in this sense, explores the dense intersection between eroticism, the transformation of the body resulting from the fusion between the human, the animal, and the vegetal elements. Her engravings depict female figures in states of metamorphosis, so that the limits of the flesh dissolve into dreamlike and disturbing landscapes. These human figures merge with animalistic elements, especially bulls, plants, and roots, becoming part of compositions that evoke eroticism from a simultaneously creative and destructive perspective, since the boundaries that separate beings become ambiguous and we don't know for sure who devours and who is devoured, what separates life from death.

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Primitive Instincts

Eroticism in Chieko Minowa's work is not restricted to a mere representation of the body, but rather to the exploration of primitive instincts, from which pleasure and pain are intertwined. Thus, her female figures are almost always represented in intense embraces with hybrid creatures, as if they were part of an act of surrender and subjugation, which refers to ancient rituals of fertility and sacrifice. In these rituals, fusion with the sacred (represented by the animal) is only possible through the dissolution of one's bodily boundaries.

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Continue reading in Premium and learn more on how Minowa's images resemble prehistoric ones, how her drawings rely on montage, the relationship between the human and the animal in her works, how the eroticism appears in the dissolution of identities, and 41 additional artworks.

Chieko Minowa is active on Instagram

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