NOBUYOSHI ARAKI: ARAKI POLAROIDS

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.

May 22 – June 28, 2025

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.

“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.