ART PLAY Magazine
KOTSUHIROI Emotional Pornographer
KOTSUHIROI is a contemporary artist based in Paris, creating a dark, haunted, erotic yet nostalgic universe via modern conceptual sculptures and photography. We asked this mysterious artist about inspirations, hidden identity and many other things, and have received a very poetic response; we we are delighted to share this exclusive interview in English and French, only on artPLAY.
artPLAY: Thank you for artPLAYing with us. Talk to us about the influences and inspirations for your art pieces, there is a visual connection to kink and bondage cultures and also to Japanese shibari, has all that been an influence.
Aoi: Defining the field of the influences is complex. The emotional and affective characters, the nature of our moods, our choices, the meetings, the disappointments, attractions and rejections add up and subtract in an almost infinite way.
“We are porous parts that breathe the climate of a floating time”.
The relationships with shibari are multiple, I don’t stop at the visual appearance or the work of “surface” that exists. The body tied by the rope is above all a dialogue that begins, learning the signs of the other, of her Self, of her personality, seeking the line and the curve, to sublimate a living flesh of expectation.
The constraint by the knot is a junction of stillness and movement, a time that one seeks to keep for oneself and a time that is going to escape us. This body deprived of “autonomy” will paradoxically seek in itself and around it a different kind of perception and feeling, a kind of link to a sublime consciousness.
The body gesture sanctified by the infinite rope, ritual of a privileged relationship between the being and the experience, the process of the feelings leaved in this act, this real time acts as an indicator of reality.
Things escape us and we want to keep them, preserve them, whisper stories to them, tell them that the sweetness of the words is a caress for our injured souls.
artPLAY: Your photography has certain dreamy and vintage quality yet it is very erotic, tell us about the aesthetics of your visuals.
Aoi: An image is the register of the “captured” and the « joined ». To embrace, with and through the image, the attributes and subjects that are the matter of my investigations, is a particular gesture.
I build a kind of story, without beginning or an end, a form of instant moment that stretches and lengthens. I record a sound of light, a form of awakening of the silent and hidden things. I wait for the word of the body to become free to show this fragile beauty, an image draws in time the revealed uncertainty. What is given comes and transmits this breath of life where experienced things are inscribed and tell the infinite possible that exists on the other side.
artPLAY: your true identity is hidden behind your art, tell us about this portrait of you that has been build via your art.
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Aoi: The self is structured by the experience and the choice. Building the « Me » in this relationship to the « I » and to the others is a form of commitment and decision. Belonging to oneself takes time, existing by one’s actions is in itself a form of definition.
I am the thickness of myself in this physical reality where my gestures determine what I am and what I am not.
“In the beginning was the act », Goethe’s Faust.
The act is the choice of a development, it requires a constellation of things that will have to be accepted and understood or refused and rejected, but by these choices, by this “touch” of the act, figuratively speaking, the object « Me » will form its scars of identity.
Art is a form of neurosis for the « Me » , a contradictory neurosis which consists in escaping from confinement and seeking in the other the object of an almost impossible understanding. A porous border that is leaking from all sides and that we’re tirelessly repairing.
This « Me » confronted with this reality in this human community translates its questions into an affect which seeks the secret room of metamorphosis.
