Artist Tatsuya Yamasaki paints “Hentai” artwork with his penis

Artist Tatsuya Yamasaki has created a knowing artwork provocatively called Hentai in which he paints a picture using his penis as a ersatz brush.

We don’t know if his YouTube video, published a month ago, will get taken down but here are some grabs. The video is a kind of time-lapse affair, with footage from different angles speeded up.

This is not parody or plain silliness. Yamasaki, who would appear to be of Japanese descent but who is from and lives in Australia, is very serious, as his artist statement reveals.

Here is the video description:

Japan: whilst there is a lot I love about this country there are some things that strike me as disturbing and even downright wrong- chiefly, perhaps, the sexual predispositions that seem to be inherent to this society . . .

Consider the saying that “a view can only be appreciated if the window is closed for most of the time,” an idiom that when examined in the context of Japanese idol culture revels something problematic about this society. For Japan is saturated with ‘idol’ culture where cuteness, innocence and the state of purity are literally obsessed over to the point of idolization. There is a strong correlation between female school uniforms and girl groups, cartoons and sexworkers. This cultural phenomenon even extends to girls being brought up thinking that once that have sex they are looked upon as used goods, used goods that no one will want.

This can be seen first hand in the experience of Minami Minegishi. A member of the famous AKB48 idol group, she was shunned and shamed to the point of feeling she had to shave her head, all because she had spent a night with a member of a boy band. Whilst she shaved her head in response to the perceived deterioration of her idol groups ‘Kawaii’ image, her male counterpart showed little remorse and is in comparison free to do as he wishes unconstrained by societal pressure placed on female members of Japanese society as a result of this idol culture.

Is it any wonder then that our birthrate is at a record low? Is it any wonder, when a culture routinely shames sexually open girls and drives Japanese men, unable to find a ‘pure’ female, to fulfill their sexual urges not in the real world but rather via the notorious genre of Hentai porn?

In my project I wanted to create a voice for the unofficial mascot of the Japanese porn industry, Hentai. A voice that wants to change the slutshaming outlook of a hypocritical society that endorses cuteness and sexiness but only to the point, it seems, that a member of that society decides to be human.

At the end of the text used in this piece are the Japanese hiragana そう(so). ‘So’ is portrayed as そう as in そうです; a phrase in Japanese used for agreement, a concurrence of terms. The purpose of the ‘so’ was to create understanding that an agreement isn’t complete without understanding and communication from both parties.

The only thing that I ask for is that we all ask for consent.

Here is the video. Yamasaki (whose other videos on his channel are very tame in comparison) censors out his actual genitals, so hopefully the powers that be won’t ban it.

The final picture integrates the character for hen (strange, change) and also the octopus from perhaps the most famous hentai artwork of all time, tentacle sex painting The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife by Hokusai.