The Kabuki of the three Samurai

Provocative, pornographic, shocking. Or sensual, poetic and disenchanted. Nobuyoshi Araki, Yasumasa Morimura and Hiroshi Sugimoto three Japanese photographers featured in the exhibition "The Kabuki Three Samurai" guide us on a journey between tradition and modernity. Nobuyoshi Araki among the most representative artists and prolific of the history of photography, says the woman, eros and its Japan through shots that come to fascinate the viewer and upset at the same time. His artistic career can not be separated from the woman. Before his wife, photographed during the honeymoon, then the women of the red-light districts, and finally all the others, who offered to the look without resistance. Among them Lady Gaga, pictured in 2009 for Vogue Hommes Japan. Women Araki resumed bound with cords lying limply on unmade beds, lasciviously lay on the floor and so tell eros and sensuality, the traditional Japanese kimono made of flowers and modernity and a little decadent. The eye that admires you feel upset, in their eyes instead seems absent the will to lead.     There are, however, those bodies ostentatious and bare breasts tight by the ropes and sex shown directly to postpone unquestionably eros orientale.Yasumasa Morimura is ap - its universal icons of the history of art, media and culture popular and proposes interpreting them in person. In particular Morimura is affected by the political and social transformations cultural occurred in the second half of the twentieth century that the changes due to the penis - traction of capitalism and of the myths of the Western world in Japan. After the start focused on dialogue with the history of art of the past, Morimura turn his gaze to the twentieth century. Impersonates Einstein, Marilyn, Frida Kahlo, Hitler using a language manic for details. The work of Marilyn Monroe taken from the series "Actress", is an example of the creative process of Morimura: like a true artist, through a change of identity, trying to come out of himself and become a "to - tro". The works are characterized by a refined style and an attention to detail and the use of digital retouching, costumes, poses and sophisticated accessories that make them unique. Through a kind of splits - chin personality Morimura plunges into the lives of others, of the "big" that have marked the history of trying to look at the existence with their eyes. His works (photographs, performance, video) are not identified but "recur himself in another" stressing the discomfort that the Japanese population has to suffer in Western culture. The features not modified, are the only means that Morimura has to claim its origin and traditions and the only way to do this is provocation. His most famous works are "Requiem for the twentieth century and" Actress ".     The photographs that make up the series by Hiroshi Sugimoto, far from being direct representations of reality, are mental images, concepts whose materialization is made possible thanks to a strict control of the photographic medium and the manual process of printing, followed also by personally 'artist. In the series *Theatre* - made photographing with exposure times long halls of the '20s and '30s, the cinema of the 50s and drive in - white light rectangular screens, illuminating the rest of the environment, contains within itself the 'entire screening of the film.  *Architectures* In the technique of fuzzy deprives the modernist architecture of temporal connotations. The long exposure times of  *Seascape* block the movement of the waves in eternal images, while the subject of *Portraits* made by photographing the characters of wax museums is immortality itself. Time is therefore the dominant theme in the work of Sugimoto, whose artistic research is always aimed at finding solutions to the problems of representation and display it places.    

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