Venus

One night in 2008.

I was walking past the National Museum of Western Art when I saw a man furtively masturbating in the dim shadows beneath the trees. His gaze was fixed on a large billboard in front of the museum, where Titian’s Venus of Urbino lay reclining.

I pretended not to notice and walked on, but later, I was left with a strange sense that I had intruded on the man’s private space without permission.

That incident has stayed with me ever since.
It’s because the fact that the man was masturbating to a painting made me realize something unsettling: even nude paintings I had grown accustomed to seeing contain a latent eroticism—something pornographic in nature.

In 2010, debates surrounding so-called “nonexistent youth” and tightening regulations on pornographic magazines became a hot topic in Japan. Amidst that atmosphere, I began to wonder: would nude images in art books also be subject to censorship someday?

With that possibility in mind, I began cutting out the nudes from art books and drawing swimsuits over them to cover their bodies.
October 2013.