Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how Matsui Fuyuko addresses aggression and violence exerted on the body through the subversion of traditional themes such as kusôzu or yureiga, which connect with the post-war male gaze in artistic manifestations such as nihonga’s ayashii style or popular culture’s eroguro.

Paper long abstract:

Matsui Fuyuko's work is articulated around the representation of female trauma under the aesthetics of the grotesque and the technique of nihonga painting.

The women presented by the artist move away from the romantic fantasy projected on the female body that was promoted by the bijinga genre to suggest the opposite: vulnerability, decadence and death. Matsui's work functions as an escape mechanism from her darkest thoughts. The women's bodies depicted in her work, sometimes self-portraits, become a kind of artistic self-injury, an aggression but also a therapy for the survivor of trauma. Through the visualization of these bodies, she works on her memory in an attempt to heal herself and even to help those who identify with that pain.

The sad fate of many women is sensed through the artist's choice of subjects: spiteful ghosts, deranged women and decomposing corpses exposed only to satisfy male desire. In her work, themes such as kusôzu or yureiga, connect with the post-war male vision in trends such as the ayashii style or eroguro. In her work, themes such as pain, self-destruction and death are the real protagonists, always told from a feminine point of view and a personal aesthetic that distances her from the kawaii aesthetics and connects her at the same time to the medieval Kamakura period.

The wide combination of influences with which her work dialogues, traditional and contemporary, Japanese and foreign, place her along the same lines as other artists of her generation that can also be found on the border between the most marginal culture and high Japanese national culture. This contributes to define a certain identity and imagery of today's Japan that nevertheless speaks to an international public that identifies with the same concerns.