AN EXHIBITION OF THE YOUNG JAPANESE ARTIST'S SEMI-ABSTRACT, MYSTERIOUS IMAGES CAPTURES INTIMATE MOMENTS

by Edward M. Gómez

TOKYO — In Grapefruit (first published in 1964), Yoko Ono’s seminal book of instruction-based, conceptual works of art, “Touch Poem for Group of People,” dated “1963 winter,” states: “Touch each other.” In a later edition of Grapefruit (1970), revised as “Touch Piece” and now accompanied by a note describing its past performances, this audience-participation work’s instruction simply stated, “Touch.”

Both language — plain but poetic and resonant in meaning — and the idea or touch or the actual experience of touching have long played big roles in Ono's art. Similarly, for the young Japanese photographer Shohei Miyachi, who was born in Shizuoka in 1989, the theme of touching — in one's fantasies, in a corporeal sense, and in unabashedly erotic contexts, too — also lies at the heart of his work; formerly based in New York, where he studied at the School of Visual Arts and at Pratt Institute, and where he later taught photography at Pratt, Miyachi is now back in Tokyo.

Today, he continues to create photographs whose eroticism often comes wrapped in cleverly constructed images in which writhing or seemingly contorted, naked bodies appear in teasingly blurred compositions, or in which uncertain glimpses of such skin-to-skin encounters are framed by others, thereby setting up eye-teasing, semi-abstract plays of ambiguous forms.