Spice Issue – Page 2 – WestEast Magazine (2024)

The Exquisite Art of the Knot

At first thought, bondage of any guise draws up associations of unhealthy sexual perversion, power-games and a pervasive threat of violence. Whether the hangover of a Judeo-Christian religious repression of sexuality or not, for many people it speaks uncomfortably of our darkest desires and animality. Bondage is an arena in which we can explore the manifestation of our darker libidinal tones.

The Japanese art of rope bondage, Shibari, involves restraining one’s partner using rope, a few simple ties and, at its most advanced, full body harnesses to suspend them from walls or ceilings. With origins in Japanese cultural history of tying and wrapping going back over a millennium, Shibari has over the past two decades established itself at the heart of the Western fetish scene. More recently the practice has broken into the art world in the works of photographers like Nobuyoshi Araki or Daido Moriyama and in the outsider artist performances of practitioners like Midori.

Author of the first English language book on Shibari, The Seductive Art of Japanese Bondage, Midori has traveled the world teaching private and group classes, performing in night clubs and galleries, doing installations and giving presentations on the history of Shibari and contemporary Japanese sex culture.

At fetish-fashion club Torture Garden during London Fetish Week in October, she performed in a cage overlooking the throbbing dance-floor. Dressed in a green rubber bunny outfit Midori restrained her partner within a tangle of ropelines fixed to the cage’s bars. Whilst the following performance seemed arch and cold in the precision of postures and ties, suggesting a scientific obsession of technique, Midori clambered around the cage like a child, jumping upon the ropes and signaling suggestive with a carrot-shaped vibrator. She was freestyling, doing what she wanted, when she wanted. It was fun, obviously unashamed fun. Culminating with the rabbit mock ‘smoking’ the orange vibrator like a giant Groucho Marx cigar.

The following day Midori taught a Salon at hip celebrity members-club Soho House. Hosted by erotic boutique Coco De Mer, the class was a beginners’ introduction to Shibari held in a mahogany and black leather paneled room with champagne and nibbles laid out for the attendees. Although seeming stern on first impression, with an authority easily understandable given her profession, this petit Japanese lady with a San Franciscan accent has an impish and cheeky character.

The Salon began with a demonstration, Midori tying up her beautiful model, showcasing the specific ties and possibilities inherent in Shibari. What was surprising was the sensuality and care involved. After blindfolding the model with rope wrapped around her eyes in order to shut-out the watching students, Midori ran rope across her skin — activating her whole body with the delicate touch of the course yet soft rope. Varying her rhythm, first slow then quick, Midori disorientated the girl by spinning her around before progressively restraining her movements by tying her arms and legs together in variable combinations.

At the climax, once two carefully positioned knots had been intimately introduced between the girl’s legs, Midori placed a vibrator in the body harness above her stomach with the explanation that the vibrations travel throughout the rope.

Throughout Midori kept returning to the metaphor of cookery, that bondage is like gourmet cooking. “It gives you an outlet to be creative within the bedroom. Something to do that is infinitely variable.” Like fine dining or dining out as opposed to microwave ready-meals at home slouched in front of the TV and “going through your usual sexual repertoire, and with you’re usual repertoire you’re limited by your tools”.

A couple of days later at a Nobuyoshi Araki exhibition at Hamiltons Gallery in London’s upper-crust Mayfair and surrounded by huge photographic prints depicting restrained and suspended models, Midori explained the history of Shibari and the different tropes of Western and Eastern p*rnography.

Araki has made a career out of documenting Japanese sex culture, from swingers clubs and hostesses, to his personal forays into bondage. The images on show depicted Japanese girls and women from all ages and body types. Some were suspended by ropes, others wearing ornate body harnesses, some were exposed, and others were being penetrated by vibrators or dild*s.

The show displayed each of the classic p*rn genres, with Araki playing off the cultural background of Japanese p*rnography. In contrast to classical Western p*rnography, where Barbie and Ken couples go at it hammer and tongs both fully presented in the shot, in classical Japanese p*rnography the male is often removed from the image — obscured in shadow or reduced by the cut to a disembodied abdomen or hand. For Midori, this displays the very different cultures of sex in the East and West and reflects the wider social structures.

Japan is a culture obsessed with wrapping, “the kimono’s wrapped, the armour is wrapped, the trees and the gardens are wrapped into great shapes, gifts are wrapped”. From kimonos to foot-binding Japanese traditions involve wrapping and binging. For Midori, this layering extends throughout the social order. Once Japanese males leave the wild years of college to enter the wider society through work they enter a rigid hierarchical structure of strict expectations and assigned places. “Clichés are the comically wrapped versions of a cultural ideal; one of the Japanese cultural virtues or personality ideals is endurance”.

In the face of this weight of societal pressure the individual is expected to follow the cultural virtue ‘to endure’. This is in stark contrast to the cultural virtues inherent within the American dream of individuality and entrepreneurship, although perhaps not so far from the British ‘stiff upper-lip’.

Repression of one’s libido by a restrictive social structure engenders an atmosphere of impotence within which the presence of another male figure within the p*rnographic image becomes threatening. Hence to preserve the fantasy and enable the viewer to identify with the image and project his libido through it, the male figure has to be obscured or invisible. The American p*rn star functions very differently — more as a gladiator or sports star, a totem or avatar of sexual projection.

Midori finds Western ‘safe p*rn applied with bondage’ of a big guy and petit little girl boring and unchallenging. “Japanese p*rn displays discomfort. Japanese p*rnography, sexuality and the undercurrent often play with discomfort, social discord, and humiliation. Humiliation is about discord and off-balanceness of one’s position, of one’s expected place in society”.

The high weight of expectation within this highly controlled, contained culture means that being put off balance or nudged aside from one’s assigned place is the taboo powering much of its sexual imagery. This off-balanceness is echoed in one of the key aesthetic principal in Shibari, to break up the symmetry of the human form, separating the columns, spreading and recombining them into new shapes and configurations. These columns can be any part of the body or of the environment around you, such as limbs, torso, wrist, thigh, chair, bed or wall. Each tie short-circuits the space between the columns, limiting one’s movement through fixing the relation between the affixed points.

The effect is “physically unsettling and thereby creates an emotional discord bringing a person into the here and now. Symmetry and order, it’s an easy place to become complacent.” Shibari certainly makes one “let go of complacency and the habit of anticipating what’s to come, you realize that you’re skill of anticipation is completely not working and that’s a really fresh place to be in.”

Many contemporary Western practitioners of Shibari trace its roots back to the martial art of Hojojutsu, “the military art of restraining people, an art learned on the battlefield for the professional training of soldiers, much in the way that fencing was a combative art and biathlon is an art of combat.” For Midori this is a romanticized myth claimed by those who “want their sexual arts validated by some historical grandiosity” and thus invent a tradition and lineage. Instead, she claims that the lineage of Shibari and the history of its introduction to the West is more fragmentary and piecemeal, involving gradual dissemination through a series of derivative images.

Hojojutsu was the Japanese equivalent of Europe’s medieval torture methods. In the way that “every culture co-opts its methods of incarceration into its darker erotic fantasies and psycho-drama in the bedroom” images of heinous crimes involving Hojojutsu techniques appeared in the tabloid erotic art and Kabuki of the late-Edo period (1603-1868). Now an austere pillar of culture, Kabuki was full of sex, betrayal, murder, rape and bondage much like the brutality found within Shakespearean plays like Titus Andronicus.

The Sengoku period which lasted roughly from the middle of the 15th century to the beginning of the 17th century and was one of the darkest eras of torture and execution in Japan, inspired cultural images within the nascent print industry and on the Kabuki stage that would stick around Japanese culture much as images of the Jesuits and the Spanish Inquisition would stick around in European culture.

With the advent of photography in the Meiji era (1868-1912) a classically trained painter and artist called Ito Seiu acquired a camera and learnt photography. Seiu took pictures of his wife tied up, restaging the scenes latent within traditional Japanese erotic imagery. Eventually he formed a photo-club for enthusiasts and created beautiful books of their works.

After the economic downturn of the mid- Twentieth Century and WWII, American GIs in Japan started frequenting the brothels and buying the dirty books available. Thus Shibari imagery starts to disseminate, somehow ending up in Australia in the possession of John Willie, an “illustrator who did the Adventures of Sweet Gwendoline, 60s outfits of corseted girls andhorny outfits upon which a lot of the images of today’s fetishes are based.” Willie tried to recreate the imagery he found in the Japanese erotic-photo books in his own photographs and the Sweet Gwendoline imagery.

Whilst still very underground, after the war there were simmering pockets of Japanese style bondage on the West coast of America as GIs filtered back bringing the arts and inspiration with them. This continued until the internet suddenly exploded bondage across the mainstream’s subconscious. “People are looking for the next greatest thing after tantra that’s exotic” says Midori of this post-internet bondage boom. With Shibari “presented in two-dimensions – stripped of all cultural context, history and symbolism – people start making up history and meaning, giving it some strange nobility because of the Judeo-Christian Western discomfort with sex.”

Whichever narrative you want to follow, of a tradition of handed down knowledge or of the dissemination of derivative imagery through cultures, Shibari has become hugely prevalent within the West’s fetish scene. Through classes such as those hosted by Coco de Mer and the art of Araki the knowledge and imagery of rope bondage is reaching broader and broader audiences.

At its core the practice is a form of sensual sculpture, using the ropes and ties to restrict the body’s movement whilst simultaneously activating it erogenously. It is this sensual aspect that is crucial for Midori. Although as an art Shibari involves specialist technique and composition it has to remain vital, intensifying and catalyzing one’s libido. Speaking of watching others perform Midori says, “If the performance is passionate then I can drop the teacher head, but if they’re technique focused they’re doing it all wrong… My goal is to affect others with a genuine authentic intensity of the moment.” It’s that immediate intensity of the moment, however we find it, which is what makes us feel alive.

Text: William Alderwick
Images special thanks to Midori

Published in Issue 27 SPICE, 2009

Frida Kahlo on white bench in Nickolas Muray’s studio, New York, 1939

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, 1940,

Frida Kahlo, The Broken Column, 1944,

Frida Kahlo, Without Hope, 1945

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Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait, 1930

Frida Kahlo, The Frame, 1938

Nickolas Muray, Frida paining The Two Fridas, Coyocan, 1939

Nickolas Muray, Frida with Nick in her studio, Coyoacan, 1941

With an unsettling desire inside, Frida Kahlo’s paintings expressed her despair and her broken heart. Beauty and pain, passion and suffering, fill every space of her insanely-coloured works – dramatic manifestos of her tragic life and feral fantasies. Continue reading Primal Sensation: Frida Kahlo →

Sex sells! The works of Helmut Newton, the surrealistic artist renowned for capturing 1920s Berlin with uniquely stylised images, are powerful aphrodisiacs. His classic yet erotic black-and-white pictures advocate a tough femininity. Of 20th Century photographers, few but Newton could fully elaborate the tender sensation of a woman’s skin. Dramatic and powerful, his works shed light on fear, desire and decadence, making him a pioneer in the field of erotic photography.

The Arielle Portfolio I-X, 1982-1999

Me & Courbet, Musee d’Orsay, Paris, 1996

Saddle I, Paris 1976

Subconscious Desire

The marriage of emotion with a specific scenario always provided the framework of Helmut Newton’s art. A half-opened door, mirror or stairs, kitchen or lobby all became secondary characters in his photographs of women. His works are a medium of erotic poetry and speak of a sensational tension and soft sexiness. Glossy skin provides his attractive women with a measure of self-defence, giving them confidence and a stronger ego. In each woman’s face, the spirit glows.

The Rise of the Jewish Photographer

In 1932, the twelve-year-old Helmut Neustädter bought his first ever camera with 3.5 Deutsche marks, and became an assistant to the renowned Berlin photographer Else Simon at the age of 16. To escape the tyranny of Nazism, Neustädter left for Singapore, where he worked as a photographer for Singapore Straits Times. His Jewish heritage caused his eventual expulsion, and he went to Australia, where he began his career in 1944 as a photographer for Australian Vogue in Melbourne. He later changed his name to Helmut Newton, and returned to Europe in 1950 with his wife June Browne (also known as Alice Springs). Two years later, Newton established himself as the first photographer signed by American Vogue, and after a year with British Vogue, Newton settled down in Paris in 1957, where he began a collaboration with French Vogue that was to endure 25 years. His nudes caused a stir in international society, and he soon became a long-term contributor for Italian and German Vogue, Playboy, Stern and Life.

Exploring the Extremity of Female Bodies

Newton avoided shooting in a studio, where women could only pose before a flat white sheet in an unfamiliar scene. Though it made his days much busier, he preferred to use his camera on the street, capturing women in public and private. Living in an era in which images of women were heavily stylised, Newton explored the totality of the female body, fighting the prevailing prejudice that all women were either prim ladies or whor*s. The sensational style that he developed, a new aesthetic of the female body, further evolved into an approach to fashion, combining and surpassing refinement, sharpness, decadence, coldness and incisiveness. A true radical, Newton made fetishism and bondage the subject of fashion photography. He might dress a model in a resplendent outfit, complete with furs, or fishnet tights and a lace bodice. In a Helmut Newton photograph, a model’s delicate visage and sexy lips are charged with confidence and an ego that is suggestive of more dangerous temptations. This was in the 1940s, when conventional definitions of femininity tended to be negative.

The Bellicose Eroticist

In an interview, Newton boldly declared, “In my book, art is an obscene word. I like vulgarity, and am always interested in bad taste, which is more exciting than good taste, which, in fact, does not exist in anyone’s imagination. Good taste is nothing but a set of standards that people measure things against.”

In an interview with Newsweek, he revealed that for him, creation was a business service: “Others take photos for art’s sake, but not me. They love it if their works are exhibited in galleries or museums, but that’s not the reason why I take up my camera. I open the camera shutter for any price.”

At the end of the 1960s, he came up with the idea of celebrating avant-garde art by relating it to the female body. With a range of breathtaking erotic photos, he shook the foundations of the fashion world. He merged the gulf between fine arts and pop culture and earned the nickname “the Bellicose Eroticist”.

The Manifesto of Feminine Power

Newton primarily established his own photography style in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Disgusted by overly-elaborate images,Newton believed that the meaning behind a photograph should be free from encryption of any kind.

“In an era dominated by plutocracy and jet engines, the public admires superstars and celebrities, and poised women with flawless makeup and sumptuous jewellery. Newton was unquestionably the sovereign celebrity photographer of the time. He was in constant pursuit of a new definition of beauty. He outfaced accusations of misogyny, and […] sculpted many tough women with his flashlight, who fearlessly risked scandal and condemnation,” commented Philippe Garner, Head of the Auction Department, Christie’s International.

The Two Violettas, Paris 1991

American Vouge, Monaco, 1996

Jeff Coons and Cicciolina Italy 1991

Charlotte Rampling as Venus in Furs, 2002

The Semi-Erotic Album

Newton was obsessed with the fashion of Yves Saint Laurent. In the “Rue Aubriot” photo series, shot for the brand’s Le Smoking Suit, Newton depicted a multifaceted woman who eventually became an icon of modernity. This finely-crafted image expressed the aloofness of Parisian women, disdainful of convention. The image was subsequently acclaimed by fashion’s bad boy, Jean Paul Gaultier, as a classic. Newton captured the toughness and solitude of the woman in trousers in a sophisticated ambiance.

The character stands in the dark, shot against the light –a signature technique in Helmut Newton’s aesthetic. He was inspired by sunlight after dark clouds in Berlin to create this style, which he called “black light”. In 1977 Helmut Newton decided to make a semi-erotic album. In such a social environment, to carry out this idea would require great caution. He decided to buy dummies to create a tableau with real models that was imbued with suspense.

Before the Berlin Wall was dismantled, the city was suffocated under totalitarian rule, which, however, did not halt Helmut Newton from continuing to excel at what he was best at — shooting female portraits. An erotic desire covertly penetrated the vein of the city, especially in the Glienicker Brücke area between Berlin and Potsdam, where secret agents shuttled through. Events sometimes resembled those in John Le Carre’s spy fiction, luring Newton to press the shutter.

The Indictment against Feminist Criticism

In Helmut Newton’s photography, women dominate the frame. It looks as if they themselves decided how to dress and pose. Before his camera, women are never coquettish; they stand nude, a statement of independence in the 1960s.

Alongside critical acclaim came outbursts of wrath from feminists, who rallied against his works. In their eyes, Newton’s works did not celebrate the beauty of the female body, but propagated chauvinism. They criticized his glamorisation of S&M’s violence and humiliation, and splashed paint on his photos. Were Newton’s works expressions of his fantasies, or explorations of the power of women? Newton responded to Alice Schwarzer, Chief Editor of Emma about sexual discrimination and racism with a boldly defiant statement: “I’m a feminist. All women in my photos are strong! I love those girls! What the feminists think is totally a product of misunderstanding! To lock women in a beautiful appearance is to imprison them. Graceful looks and bodies are static; they are like a mask that anyone can project onto. But this idea has never crossed my mind.”

The Voyeur

“All my images are raw. I use no technological media to alter existing reality. I capture only the reality that I see.”

In the surrealistic, ambiguous fantasy that Newton created, the borderline between imagination and reality completely vanished, and his undisguised images reveal the subconscious of the viewer.

“I only shoot those I like and admire from my heart, regardless of their fame,” he declared in an interview. “If a photographer denies being a voyeur, he is an idiot who is frigid about images.”

Newton’s iconic style has had a great influence on modern-day photographers such as Ellen von Unwerth, Wayne Maser, Jürgen Teller, and Terry Richardson. Newton’s works are like stills from a road-trip: Cannes, Monte Carlo, Venice, Rome, New York and Hollywood are all favourite scenes. Indoor space, streets, a kitchen, a park, the seaside or a garage, or even the balcony of his home in Monte Carlo, were the stages where his spotlight shone.

A Modern Metaphor

Helmut Newton fled to Australia to escape Jewish persecution during World War II. In October 2003, Newton donated his wealth of photos to the Berlin Museum of Photography and founded the Helmut Newton Foundation, which many considered a sign of reconciliation with Germany.

Throughout his life, the shadow of the Baroque-style building across from the old Berlin train station – once a casino, now the Berlin Museum of Photography and the site of the Helmut Newton Foundation – never faded from his mind, for it was the last building he saw as he left Berlin.

On 23rd January 2004, Newton was killed in a car accident in Los Angeles, which Karl Lagerfeld described as his “last work.” He was laid to rest in West Berlin, next to Marlene Dietrich.

Nude, the Elegant Liberation

During his years of collaboration with fashion designers, ‘fashion’, ‘nude’ and ‘portrait’ were his core areas of creation. He used the term, ‘Minimalism’ to assert that ‘the less models wear, the more they express’ and accordingly liberated female bodies and imbued them with the power of attraction. Carsten Ahrens, Director of the Weserburg Bremen Museum in Germany, argued:

“Between fashion and lust is a kind of chemistry that intoxicates. What Newton was interested in was not just fashion photography. He brilliantly rendered a key that symbolized power and wealth to women’s self-aware sexuality. In these photographs, woman never appears objectified; Newton liberated a new generation of women with an elegant nakedness.”

Be it the ‘Big Nude’ series inspired by RAF Terrorists, the topless waitress flirting with a cruise passenger, the confident naked movie star at the poolside, or the thrilling night view from a motel, Newton never failed to capture the cold charisma of a confident woman.

Art critics regarded him as a solitary maestro who used photography to create a flamboyant vanity, portraying the dark side of humanity, while resisting common morality and politics. Perhaps it was his personal mixture of calmness, rationality, and an unruly nature that allowed him to create a contemporary humanism within his camera, and new, powerful visual language

Text: Chih-Hung, Lin
English Translation: Ren Wan
Photo Courtesy of Helmut Newton Estate & Weserburg Bremen Museum

Published in Issue 27 SPICE, 2009

East and West: two different hemispheres. Fashion and Art: two different planets. When they collide at Dior, something captivating is created.

Despite the Beijing winter chill, it was a night bustling with excitement when Dior held the November 2008 “Christian Dior & Chinese Artists” exhibition at The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in the 798 Arts Zone. This was more than an exhibition — perhaps, rather, a time tunnel, spanning the past few decades to reveal the essence of this classic, French luxury brand, and to demonstrate its singularity of expression in respect of cultural identity.

From an unknown couturier

Nowadays, the word Dior has become a synonym for French luxury and the title of a vast fashion empire. In fact, everything started in 1946, when a man dreamed of setting up a small couture house. Christian Dior established a small, closed house with few ateliers, in which he worked devotedly according to “the traditions of the very best couture” for a clientele of genuinely elegant women, creating “designs that appeared simple, but that were, in reality, very elaborately constructed.”

The historical moment came in 1947, when an audience of journalists, buyers, and socialites witnessed, with amazement, the first collection from an unknown couturier. His designs were seen to represent a “New Look” which drew a line under the war years and instantly became an influence on the fashion scene in Europe, where all elegant women immediately adopted the change of style. The designs seemed to liberate women’s dreams after the bleak years of wartime. Dior’s New Look brought about the restoration of luxury, and in Christian Dior’s words: “Young women realized that the opulent and regal fashion of their dreams was now accessible to them.”

It was true. What Dior sold were dreams. These dreams were perfectly executed by means of cuts, fabrics, and techniques invented behind the closed doors of the workshops. Dior rebuilt the silhouette of a woman’s body, transforming the female form into a line sinuous with curves, far removed from the rigors of the war years. Instead of padded shoulders, there was padding to emphasize the hips, inspired by nostalgia for the long, flower-like skirts and narrow waists of the 18th and 19th centuries and the Belle Époque. It was at this time that Dior began to extend his influence over the entire fashion world, his name a by-word for haute couture.

Monsieur Dior succumbed to a heart attack in 1957, but after his death, his legendary fashion house continued to move from strength to strength. His successors have included the young Yves Saint Laurent, from 1958 to 1960; Marc Bohan in 1961, and Gianfranco Ferré in 1989. Since 1996, John Galliano has been at Dior’s helm. In 2001, Hedi Slimane was appointed Artistic Director of Dior Homme, and in 2007, Kris Van Assche replaced him, rocking the world of men’s fashion. Dior’s Haute Joaillerie, by Victoire de Castellane, offers an innovative take on the traditional world of precious gems.

Each of these creative talents contributed, in their own particular way, to the revolutionary heritage of Monsieur Dior. Perhaps this has far exceeded his expectations, but maybe it was his original vision to build a fashion empire, in which haute couture represented the spiritual heart of the house, while its designers excelled in creating perfume, beauty, jewelry, prêt-à-porter, and accessories.

Reinterpretation of the Chronicle of Time

The story continues on the other side of the world, having travelled from Paris to Beijing. This November, the Dior exhibition at the UCCA bears witness to the vitality of art in China and of fashion in France. The show features over 20 specially-commissioned artworks inspired by Dior designs, whether by Monsieur Dior, John Galliano, Kris Van Assche, or Victoire de Castellane – as well as by emblematic Dior objects, such as perfumes and accessories. The exhibition includes the work of 22 Chinese artists, including Wang Du, Zhang Huan, Huang Rui, and Li Songsong; Zhang Dali, Xu Zhongmin, Liu Jianhua, and Zheng Guogu; Lu Hao, Wang Qingsong, Yan Lei, and Zhang Xiangang; Wen Fang, Shi Jingsong, Wang Gongxin, and Quentin Shih; Liu Wei, Rong Rong & Inri, Tim Yip, Qiu Zhejie and Ma Yan Song. Including a selection of designs, sketches and photographs from the Dior archives, the exhibition revisited the house’s historical moments and selected key elements as the source of future inspiration. The show revealed the power of Chinese influence over the Western world and confronted eastern and western culture with an eye on the future.

Apart from the line of contributing artists, our Guest Director Tim Yip showcased his spacial aesthetics at the exhibition as the setting designer. The setting, according to Tim, celebrates the beauty of Chinese landscape. “The venue has a great room fora huge setting, but the interior structure lacked a pleasant aura.” Thus Tim erected a 50-centimetre platform and a slipway to water the bamboos, the symbol of refinement in Chinese culture. “Bamboos and water form a special combination to create the mood of the courtyard in ‘Floating Leaf Garden’ (the name of the set as an art piece). It is a harmonious East-meets-West fusion.”

Rongrong & Inri

One of the most interesting contributions is the photography of Rongrong & Inri, whose work is inspired by John Galliano’s dresses. Rongrong from China and Inri from Japan offer an Asian interpretation of the fashion house. The pair had only a vague awareness of Dior before the UCCA project.

“Fashion just seemed like something that the media were always talking about, and I always just chose clothes that I felt comfortable in,” Rongrong recalls. “But after the collaboration with Dior, I realized that some brands have a unique personality. The development of a fashion house like Dior is a long journey, and each piece has a story behind it.” They discovered what an haute couture dress is by examining one closely. It was an exceptional experience, and they considered the design to be a perfect work of art:

“First we looked at the pictures of the dresses and asked Dior to send them to Beijing for shooting. We took all the dresses home to see how we felt about them. When we touched the fabric, and looked closely at every detail, we understood that we were examining something more than just a dress,” said Inri.

The candle-lit photo-shoot, for which the pair used an antique Japanese wood camera, yielded monochrome pictures to extraordinary visual effect. “We took black and white images and added colour to the parts we wanted to highlight. We added this soft colour to emphasise particular details on the dresses and to give the images a softer touch.” Rong Rong and Inri are among the few photographers who still use silver based photography in digital format and super sized Chinese format, making for a unique artistic signature.

Rong Rong and Inri’s artwork represents a reinterpretation of Western perspectives on Asian culture. While John Galliano’s designs for Dior incorporate Japanese stylings, Inri, as a Japanese artist, sees them differently:

“There are some Japanese elements, but as a whole, the designs are still very European. The ceremonial kimono becomes a wrap skirt; origami folding shapes the collar of a New Look-style jacket; an obi belt decorates a Premier Empire dress. Thedesigns reveal a Western reception of Asian influence, and our work reinterpreted this reception, informed by our nationalities. It’s a meaningful way to examine the cultural exchange between East and West.”

The two artists did not want to limit themselves to typical fashion photography, resolving instead to give “a bit of themselves”to the project. Rather than using living models, they sourced mannequins in Japan, and chose to simply wear the dresses themselves:

“Using real models would have been rather more complicated as this would have created a three-way interpretation. We wanted to maintain a direct approach, so we just put on the clothes and experienced the designer’s concepts ourselves. From the outside, you can observe the different layers of the dresses. When you put them on, it’s a completely different experience, as you can feel every detail from the inside. You seem to be another person,” Rongrong explained. “The clothes present their own form in reality, but with our cameras we presented a deeper emotion about these clothes.”

Collaborators since the year 2000, Rong Rong and Inri have formed a brilliant team. Over the past eight years, they have come to share a common understanding. Inri recalls, “At the beginning, we couldn’t speak each other’s language” – (now speaks in fluent Mandarin) – “and sometimes we had to use body language to communicate. Some might have considered this a problem, but I think it has been good for us, as we now know each other’s thoughts without saying a word — it’s like having a sixth sense!”

Today, China is a cradle for new artistic trends, with the emergence of many up-and-coming contemporary artists working in a variety of different media. The country has undergone a surge of creativity that fascinates the West, and the strong personalities of the emerging artists have impressed the world. The Dior exhibition both demonstrates the legendary history of the fashion house, and the power of contemporary artists in China. “It represents a new possibility. It’s an exhibition about afashion brand, but presented as if it were art. We just chose to explore a new world.”

Text: Venice Lau
Images Courtesy of Christian Dior

Published in Issue 27 SPICE, 2009

The saga of the Blonde Bombshell

Marilyn Monroe (1926 – 1962) dispelled a post-war haze. She swept away bleakness and sublimated lust and desire. Her mysterious eyes inspired the prosperity of her times and a fantasy like no other. At the 82nd anniversary of her birthday, the world retraced her iconic allure and innocence that once graced the silver screen and the minds of men and women alike. Continue reading Life as a Legend: Marilyn Monroe →

Modern society is overloaded with images. How, in your opinion, do you tell the good, from the bad, or the plain ugly? Continue reading Mark Holborn In Conversation With Tim Yip →

“Have you ever seen the mountains bathed in shafts of red and interwoven with endless sea of clouds? The bloody red shafts are fiery and lucid, eagerly mirroring the sky. At such a moment, it feels like that we exist in a timeless space. Underneath our feet is the solid earth of history, and above our heads is the lucid red splendor carrying the reflection of the sky. There, no differentiation exists.” — Tim Yip in ‘Rouge: L’art de Tim Yip’ Continue reading The Man Behind Desire: Interview with Tim Yip →

Swarovski’s Creative Director Nathalie Colin Roblique tells her story. Continue reading All That Glitters →

An almost unrecognisable but undeniably gorgeous blonde with floppy bangs, a stiff white science coat and geeky glasses sits at a computer screen in a sterile laboratory… a few seconds later after staring into a microscope — she transforms into the woman we know as Dita Von Teese. Continue reading Dita Von Teese: Sugar and Spice →