Eroticism, Dark Fairy Tales, And Transgression In the Work Of Saori Furukawa

Eroticism for Girls

The work of Japanese artist Saori Furukawa (古川沙織) has stood out within contemporary Japanese erotic illustration by bringing together elements drawn from fairy tales, fantastic literature, eroticism, shōjo visual culture, representations of the female body, and a tradition in which beauty and cruelty can coexist within the same image. Born in 1976, Furukawa graduated from the advanced course in Japanese painting (nihonga) at Saga Art Junior College and has worked as a painter and illustrator, as well as in the production of art events and the direction of exhibitions. The National Diet Library of Japan records her birth in 1976 and her activity as an illustrator, while documentation from her first solo exhibition, held at Vanilla Gallery in 2007, already defined her production through the expression “少女のエロティックな黒いメルヒェン,” which may be translated as “dark and erotic fairy tales for girls.”

Fig.1  Seinaru morino monogatari 

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In her images, eroticism rarely appears in isolation, since Furukawa inserts it into small visual narratives whose themes almost always involve danger, submission, pleasure, and death, set within natural environments that participate in the creation of her fantasy worlds. Her first solo exhibition, 薔薇とネクタール (Bara to Nekutāru / La Rose et le Nectar, “The Rose and the Nectar”), held at Vanilla Gallery in November 2007, presented this universe through the image of a secret garden deep within a castle, a space in which cruel and forbidden games would unfold. Announced as the artist’s first solo exhibition, the show already established elements that would remain recurrent throughout her career by associating female youth, flowers, eroticism, secrecy, and cruelty.

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Eroticism as Narrative

An important aspect of Furukawa’s work lies in the fact that the erotic image usually presupposes a narrative, so that her characters seem to participate in stories that began before the moment represented and will continue after it. This characteristic distinguishes her production from erotic illustration focused solely on the display of the body. Settings, objects, clothing, flowers, and gestures suggest events and relationships among the characters, allowing each composition to be understood as a fragment of a kind of visual tale. We can observe how this narrative dimension became explicit in ピピ嬢の冒険 / L’aventure de Mademoiselle Pipi (Pipi-jō no bōken, “The Adventures of Mademoiselle Pipi”), an exhibition held at Vanilla Gallery in 2011 and subsequently turned into a book by Atelier Third. In the presentation of the exhibition, Furukawa herself stated the intention of her work in particularly direct terms: “少女のための性愛画を描いています,” that is, “I paint erotic images for girls.” She added that she wanted women, when looking at her images, to experience an erotic response. In making this statement, Furukawa reveals her intention to alter the position traditionally assigned to the viewer of the erotic image, avoiding the presentation of her work as images of women intended primarily for male desire. By declaring that she creates erotic images for women, the artist shifts both the intended audience and the perspective from which desire is constructed. Nevertheless, the viewer’s gaze cannot be controlled by the authorship of the work, since there is no absolute correspondence among intention, representation, and reception. Eroticism makes this distance even more evident, because the viewer’s desire introduces into the image something that belongs neither entirely to the artist’s intention nor to what is materially represented.

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This does not mean that her characters always appear in positions of dominance. On the contrary, vulnerability, surrender, submission, and power relations form part of her repertoire, preventing an eroticism produced by a woman from being confused with a simple reversal of the positions traditionally assigned to the genders. What matters is not simply what the characters do or the positions they occupy, but the perspective from which these situations are imagined and offered to the viewer. Furukawa works with visual codes that have a long history in the erotic representation of the female body and therefore cannot be completely separated from conventions associated with the male gaze; appropriating these codes, however, does not necessarily mean reproducing the logic that originally shaped them. By incorporating them into an erotic imaginary produced by a woman and also directed toward the fantasies of other women, the artist destabilizes the correspondence between represented submission and the submission of the represented subject to the gaze of the observer. A fantasy may involve vulnerability, loss of control, or surrender without reducing the woman to a passive object of another person’s desire, since the figure occupying a submissive position within the scene may remain the subject from whose perspective desire itself is imagined. The question raised by Furukawa’s work, therefore, is not one of replacing the male gaze with a supposedly pure female gaze, but of observing how conventions historically associated with the former can be appropriated, negotiated, and displaced when the woman ceases to constitute only the object of fantasy and also participates in its production and enunciation.

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Continue reading in Premium and discover our further study of Furukawa's delicate, dark, and decadent gothic-fairytale aesthetics based on the following principles:

• Eroticism as Narrative
• Fairy Tales and Dark Eroticism
• Between Innocence and Transgression
• Nature, Body, and Desire
• Eroticism and Power Relations
• The Gaze and Secrecy
• Her Three Books: Pipi, Seinaru mori, and Mistress Alice
• An Eroticism Constructed through Contradiction

Saori Furukawa is active on Instagram

Click HERE for the eroticism and the grotesque in the work of Hayashi Asako

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