VILLAZAN is pleased to present “ARAKI POLAROIDS: A Raw Vision of Desire and Impermanence”, an intimate and provocative survey of Nobuyoshi Araki’s Polaroid photography. The exhibition is on view from May 22 to June 28, 2025 at VILLAZAN Project Space.

The Polaroid, with its immediacy and material fragility, becomes the perfect vessel for Araki’s radical vision. In “ARAKI POLAROIDS”, the viewer is confronted with images that are both deeply personal and violently performative, capturing fleeting moments where sexuality, fetishism, and emotion coalesce into a singular frame.

Araki’s use of the Polaroid is not merely technical, it is ontological. The instant photograph, incapable of replication, mirrors his obsession with the ephemeral. Like a haiku in image form, each Polaroid encapsulates a moment charged with lust, vulnerability, and theatrical intensity. Whether depicting staged erotic tableaux or portraits of lovers, these works challenge the boundaries between art and pornography, documentation and fiction.

The exhibition traces Araki’s distinctive visual grammar: his use of bondage, flowers, dolls, and the female body to construct a language of desire and control. But beneath the explicitness lies a deeper meditation on loss, impermanence, and the act of looking. Araki’s Polaroids are not simply voyeuristic, they implicate the viewer in the act of seeing, forcing a confrontation with one’s own gaze and its power.

Nobuyoshi Araki: Eroticism, Ritual, and the Instant Image

Few contemporary artists have pushed the limits of photographic intimacy as relentlessly as Nobuyoshi Araki. With a career spanning over five decades and more than 500 published photobooks, Araki has cultivated a prolific and polarizing body of work. His Polaroids represent a raw, unfiltered dimension of his practice, where the photograph becomes both document and fetish object.

Influenced by Japanese traditions of shunga, kabuki theatre, and post-war street photography, Araki merges ritual and eroticism into a distinctive aesthetic. His recurring themes (bondage, mourning, erotic play) are imbued with a sense of personal mythology. The Polaroid’s immediacy intensifies this mythology, rendering each shot an artifact of desire, memory, and death.

Araki has described his photography as “a kind of diary,” a way of capturing life as it slips away. The Polaroid, with its inherent inability to be reprinted or retouched, aligns perfectly with this ethos. Each image becomes a trace, fragile, fading, and irreplaceable.

Beyond the Frame: Documentation and Legacy

Alongside the Polaroid series, the exhibition includes a video screening and archival material that contextualize Araki’s broader impact on contemporary photography. Through interviews, photobooks, and behind-the-scenes footage, viewers can trace the evolution of his themes, methods, and controversies.

Far from being an isolated body of work, the Polaroids resonate with ongoing questions in photographic discourse: What is intimacy in an age of mass image production? Can the erotic be emancipatory? Where does the line lie between art and transgression?

The Theater of the Instant

“ARAKI POLAROIDS” is a confrontation with what cannot be repeated. These images, born of spontaneity and obsession, distill the paradox of the instant: at once eternal and vanishing. Araki transforms the Polaroid into a site of performance, confession, and ritual, a stage where the body becomes text, the photograph a scream, a whisper, a wound.

Through this lens, the exhibition asks: What remains when the image fades? Is desire a record or a rupture? In Araki’s world, the answer is always both.

‍