Extraordinary imagery from Jun Hayami's BLOODSTAINED ANGELS (2011), available in the US from akatako.net
Perhaps better than any other Japanese artist, Hayami captures intense, cruel, vile, sociopathic sexuality that also has its opposite, an opposite rarely allowed by mainstream media.
The artistry is absolute, consistent, and troubling in the very best way.
Definitely not for all tastes, each work is a voyage into illustrated hell.
Thankfully, the only real hurt is to the trees from which the paper comes.
Jun Hayami's Beauty Labyrinth of Razors has been somewhat of an untouchable, Holy Grail publication for me. It is said that Creation Books released a version of it limited to 69 copies, but I've been unable to acquire it because I refuse to pay the current eBay asking price of $400. My primary objection to handing over four hundred bucks is a story that the work is partially censored for "highly objectionable content". Creation Books has been sheepish about all aspects of the book's release, so the truth of their edition remains elusive.
Fortunately, thanks to the amazing akatako.net, I've finally acquired the original, totally uncut Japanese edition of the book.
Expecting unbridled extremity, I was a little disappointed in the content, but now that I've perused it several times, looking for clues to its infamy, I can confidently say that it is one of the saddest, darkest, most wretched tomes of true horror I've seen in many a blue moon.
It is a collection of close to a dozen tales of heinous behavior directed mostly towards women. Men are depicted as lecherous, foul beasts, and Hayami's world view is bleak and anxiety-ridden. Although the women suffer terribly, the men often end up as crushed, gaping shells of viscera.
Some of the art is detailed and some of it is spare and simple. Various pieces feel like they've been hijacked from Panorama of Hell, Hideshi Hino's earth-shattering last word on grim.
If you've already exposed yourself -- God help you! -- to Japan's Guro genre, some of the content of Razors will not be unfamiliar. Although artists such as Waita Uziga, Horihone Saizou, Kaneyama Shim, and Shintaro Kago have produced equally graphic, incendiary content, few of their works have bled from the soul as furiously as this one (with the exception of the same artist's Maggot Hole, An Ugly Daughter Like Me, and Hentai Shounen.
Sometimes we don't understand why we take the journey, but we are mindful of the need to at least consider what represents a destination.
Not a manga or even Japanese, Joseph Scott Morgan's Blood Beneath My Feet is a fine companion piece to Razors.
Exploring mortality from a coroner's cold perspective, it finds literary salvation in steaming human fluids and splattered DNA.
Morgan writes with the direct poetry of Jim Thompson and the candor of Selby Jr. and Bukowski.
When I behold the astonishing work of Samura Hiroaki, I reflect on the pointlessness of debating High, Low, and Fine art.
Samura's The Love of the Brute (and Bradherley's Coach, another towering work) are mind-bending ero-gro (guro), and definitely Great Art.
Those who engage in the demeaning practice of relegating works of art to ghettos, galleries and museums often base their judgments on their own personal comfort levels with the subject matter. They seem incapable of evaluating the skill of the artist because they are blinded by the glare of their own inhibitions and they fear the career consequences of championing what they've been schooled to consider "trash".
The solution is to render irrelevant those who ghetto-ize material such as this, those nose-in-the-air tragics handicapped by a moral barometer that has no place in art.
These self-appointed guardians of mainstream acceptability spend their lives canonizing saints of artistic blandness while stitching circles of influence around themselves and their fawning acolytes.
Much of Samura's work, and the work of artists such as Jun Hayami, is unavailable in America because printers refuse to handle it, and most publishers fear the repercussions of publishing it.
What type of free society have we become that we fear written and illustrated expression? Why is freedom so damn conditional these days that the word itself is being redefined?
We should be shot for using it so loosely.
Why have we allowed our tastes and choices to be decided by an invisible cultural dictatorship whose only desire is dominion?
Who canceled the human race, and substituted it with a backwards human crawl to oblivion?
With exceptions, our planet has become a complex support system for frightened, paranoid, uninformed, ignorant lemmings. The exceptions are the fuckers raping these lemmings and a small minority who see it as it really is.
Great art shakes us like a bawling baby and questions everything we've been taught.
It peels the epidermis back and rubs our face in the excrement of our dreams and nightmares.
Most importantly, Art slaps us awake, and reminds us that most of what we know isn't... going... to... fuckin... save us, but it will sure make the journey fascinating.
Samura's The Love of the Brute and Jun Hayami's...
... are remarkable for their purity of vision and total indifference to the irrelevant sensibilities of a world that has exchanged truth with commerce.
Although it's the right of any publisher or printer to refuse to take a job on, the tragedy is that they clearly equate art such as this with criminality and immorality; they're unable to separate the work from the reproduction of the work.
The separation and understanding of the differences between what is private and what is public are keys to why extraordinary art such as this has emerged from Japan.
The production of er-gro (Erotic-Grotesque) art like this is not in any way considered akin to criminal or immoral behavior in Japan. The country has a rich tradition of work of this nature, a tradition launched by a movement in the 20's and 30's. Focusing primarily on the malformed and horrific, it broadened its definition to include sexuality, deviance, and bodily corruption.
And as depicted in these scans, Western cinema has had a potent influence on the genre also. It is impossible to experience these images without reflecting on Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust...
... a film whose poster art is re-imagined with glee in the work at the top of the page.
In a peculiar way, ero-gro reinforces the status quo by illuminating its stark opposite (the "corruption" of the status quo), but let's not kid ourselves that it doesn't also express our inner anarchy, and let's not pretend that it doesn't raise a wet, dripping flag of truth about our primal selves. And by existing, I would argue, provides a catharsis.
Without that catharsis... well, you figure it out. Then take a look at sex crime figures in Japan versus sex crime figures in the U.S.
What other so-called High Art does all this so brilliantly?
