Namio HarukawaCourtesy of Baron
A sumptuous new book pays tribute to the artist, who became one of Japan’s leading erotic visionaries in the 1960s and 70s
April 08, 2021
On 24 April 2020, Japanese artist
Namio Harukawa died at the age of 72, leaving behind an extraordinary body of work that explored his love of female domination. Obsessed with scenes of erotic asphyxiation, wherein voluptuous women revel in the pleasures of facesitting and transform diminutive men into human furniture, Harukawa established himself as one of Japan’s best known fetish artists in the 1960s and 70s.
Working under a pseudonym formed from an anagram of “Naomi”, the heroine in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s novel