Private Eroticism in Maki Miyashita's “Rooms and Underwear”

Is there anything more erotic than privacy? The freedom and comfort of privacy? Maybe not for the person actively existing within it, taking for granted the kind of intimacy that by default exists between oneself and oneself, and no one else. When we celebrate the intimacy between us and our partners, what we’re saying is that this relationship has a charge of the same trust and vulnerability and shelter and all around comfort we experience with ourselves when alone. Why else is it impossible to separate sex from voyeurism? Even when nothing more explicit than, e.g., vacuuming in a bathrobe is witnessed. In a general sense, the explicitness of the scene is irrelevant to its, as it were, erotic thrum, same goes for the act of intrusion. Rather, the eroticism of being alone in one’s room, curtains drawn, is entirely in the comfort of privacy and its even more sexually connotative sister-notion of secrecy. This is the philosophy behind Maki Miyashita’s “Rooms and Underwear,” the subject of today’s article.

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Maki Miyashita

Born in 1975, Maki Miyashita graduated from the Department of Visual Arts at Kyoto University of Arts Junior College. While not common within the international discourse of Japanese photographers, in Japan she is a well celebrated artist of her circle, having photographed the likes of Seth Green and Macaulay Culkin. Despite her celebrity portraits, her most notable work remains “Rooms in Underwear.”

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Rooms and Underwear

Rooms and Underwear, published in 200, when Miyashita was 24, is a collection of women, in their rooms, in their favorite pair of underwear. The idea came to her when on the bullet train, looking out the window and seeing the passing apartment complexes and wondering what the private lives of the people inside were. Miyashita figured it most effective to get a sense of these girls' private lives by stripping them of their outer layers, which can serve as a mask or armor, as it were. R&U was very well received, being exhibited at major venues. While the prominence of the work, like its author, has lessened over time, it decidedly remains as interesting today as it was in its year of release.

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Style

While compositions differ photo to photo, most place the girl at center-back of the frame, allotting most frame-space to the furniture of the environment. Meaning the girls are close to drowning in their stuff. Part of Miyashita’s methodology appears to be enforcing the idea that we are defined by the objects we surround ourselves with. Her collection allows us into someone’s most private environment, an environment that through its decor and design provides unequivocal insight into Them (who they are). There is a kind of mild artistic or philosophical double entendre in such, i..e., allowing someone into one’s private space. Few are allowed to see someone so metaphorically naked. This idea is emphasized within a Japanese cultural context, where one's home is often kept wholly private, a mystery even to most friends. R&U satisfies this curiosity by allowing us a peak by the curtain.

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Click HERE for the provocative nude sessions of the Chinese photographer Ren Hang

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