Creation As an Ikon

by Ken-ichi Murata

When I was ten years old, I came to realize that “the human will die someday”. And I got so afraid of death that I could not get out of my house at all. Since then I got anxiety neurosis and have been living with it. Therefore, this disease has influenced my life. And the consciousness of death which I always have influences my creation a lot. Then I will tell you how they influence my works.
With the action of binding, I can express “Captivity by others” and can also express “Self Captivity in mind”. And those expressions also reflect the condition that all my life was bound to my obsession due to neurosis.
There is a photograph that a rubber hose comes out of a girl’s vagina. The hose can be taken as a penis and also be taken as a umbilical cord. In that photograph, the girl, nourished by being connected with something, is sleeping. And her face is quite easy. In my image, the girl is like a peacefully sleeping fetus, and, as it were, a princess in the tale “The Sleeping Beauty”.
With such imagination, I derive erotic stories from fairy tales and classic literature, and by my interpretation, I remake the stories. And with my obsession, I develop the stories further to be unique.
So my photographs are shot like illustrations of fairy tales. Because this edition by Edition Reuss is fragmentary, the series of photos do not seem like a fairy tale. But, for instance, my works including scatology were made from one of the tales of Japanese aincient matters (“Kojiki”). In the story, there was a goddess who raised vegetables or crops by releasing her piss or shits. I created those of my works according to the story.

When I started creating the series, the theme was always “death and re-birth”. And in the basic stories of those of my works, there are two types ; “a girl wandered around the different world and got raped by monsters. But she released herself strongly” or “And then she got assimilated to the different world or monsters and ended up rotting away.”
Most of such different world and those monsters in my works are metaphor of death. Or they implicitly express disability of models. It is the same of the story of “The Sleeping Beauty” that the wicked witch made the princess sleep in brambles and the princess was finally reborn. But in my works, there is a story that the princess got taken in brambles and finally assimilated to them.
Repeating those photographic shootings, I gradually got familiar with death and now I got a harmony agreement with it. This may have been due to the fact that I take eros for a primitive religion. So I add a kind of magical story to the models’ eros held in the garret, and fix it on the developing paper, and regard it as my own “Ikon”.
This is my new way of relationship with death because I do not have any religion.