We are proud to announce Michael Hoppen Contemporary’s second exhibition of work
by Nobuyoshi Araki, proclaimed Japan’s greatest living photographer.

Araki’s diverse subjects range from Tokyo backstreets, to Kinbaku, the Japanese art of bondage, to sumptuously coloured and transient flowers. The themes of love, death, sex, consumption and beauty have inspired Araki since his seminal work became known in Europe and North America in the 1970’s. Some of his images are disturbing, but to see only selected elements of his work is to see only a sterile half-truth. His images of flowers and women, in particular, are darkly erotic; he presents a perverse vision of beauty with a scent of corruption. Behind even the most conventional of Araki’s images there is a sense of something ‘else’ transmitting an arresting and ominous quality.