Kunstraum Richard Sorge

Hiroki Otsuka

Intro

Hiroki Otsuka: From Manga to Ero-Pop

Japanese artist Hiroki Otsuka is undergoing an exciting shift in his career, and looking at his recent output, he is doing so with great ease and acumen. A comic book illustrator for the past thirteen years with a strong penchant for the erotic storylines of pornographic manga aimed at straight Japanese men, Otsuka has shifted gears and is now producing deeply disturbing paintings based on the unstable nature of sexuality in contemporary Japan.

In these mostly monochrome works, Otsuka renders sexually charged teenage girls in a variety of helpless poses, hermaphroditic baby doll monsters and nymphs, strong squared-off katakana characters painted directly onto the gallery wall blasting forth onomatopoeiac sex sounds, and a litany of anxious men in various stages of sexual release. The works are made with the traditional Japanese sumi ink used in calligraphy, and their jet black figures stand out against white ground as if to say, "Look at me. Know me. Help me. Now turn away." It is indeed with a certain amount of embarrassment and discomfort that these works delve into our own experiences of the carnal; whether straight, gay, trans-gendered or otherwise, these works speak to the diversity of sexuality just as much as they portray unspeakable acts or hidden fantasies.

Otsuka honed his crafts over a decade of drafting and inking comic book cells for a variety of publications he authored under the pen name Pirontan, and began illustrating for a number of major Japanese publications in 2004, including the gay-themed magazine Badi and the straight-leaning manga series Erotics, Rabumani and Hi-5. While working on these projects, he began to think about the possibility of shifting his focus from the graphic to the fine arts, and with the same set of hentai (pervert) tendencies with which he creates his comics, he set about a series of paintings that seemingly exposes the dark corners of human sexuality.

Written by Eric C. Shiner.

Eric C. Shiner is an independent curator and art historian specializing in Japanese contemporary art. He holds two master's degrees in art history, from Yale University and from Osaka University. His scholarly focus is on the concept of bodily transformation in postwar Japanese photography, painting, and performance art. He is currently Milton Fine Curator of Art at the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. He served as an adjunct professor of East Asian Contemporary Art at Cooper Union, Stony Brook and Pace Universities, and was assistant curator of Yokohama Triennale 2001. Mr. Shiner has served as a guest curator for numerous exhibitions in New York including Making a Home: Japanese Artists in New York at Japan Society. He is an active writer and translator, and is a contributing editor for ArtAsiaPacific.

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Kunstraum Richard Sorge, Landsberger Allee 54, Old Brewery, 10249 Berlin-Friedrichshain
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