Less than fifteen minutes into the dark, sexually driven anime Wicked City, a woman transforms into a demon; becoming arachnid and monstrous from below the waist. After making the first few paintings of what would become her latest exhibition — currently showing at the Sebastian Gladstone gallery in Los Angeles — artist Motoko Ishibashi returned to the film, and ended up using it as a title for her show. She describes Wicked City as a film that “uses sex as a decoy” in order to “lure people in”, an impression that also lingers on her paintings that crop, distort, and exaggerate the female form, pushing it towards new extremes.
For Motoko, this level of distortion holds up a funhouse mirror to both the history of the female body in art, and its contemporary representations on screen. She argues that a more “comical interpretation” of her work is important to understanding both it, and the cultural references that it stems from, saying that if it’s made too serious then it just becomes a reference to the “traditional nude”. And if there’s one word that doesn’t fit with Motoko’s paintings, its traditional: an image like “BBB_4”, with the chest and rear of a bikini-clad female figure exaggerated to be comically vast and disproportionate takes the idea of a surgically altered body and pushes it up to an eleven, creating new questions around the idea of what can be seen as erotic.
The images of Wicked City immediately prompt a wide variety of responses; Motoko’s work pushes up against the notions of the pornographic; images like “BBT_2” and “A View” invite viewers to gaze, voyeuristically, at the bodies that Motoko creates. The vast difference in the body types on display in these two images seems to ask the question of which bodies are the most sexual or the most objectified; and at what point an objectified body simply becomes an object. Motoko laughs when she says that some people are disturbed by the work, a reaction that surprises her. “You see adverts, actors, singers, or people on social media, and there’s so much nudity exposed,” she says, referencing the Kardashians specifically. While these public figures create an idea of what the culturally-enshrined ideal female body might be, she notes, even this is “exaggerated”.
When Motoko is finding images for a show like this, she explains, the question of if it crosses the line into porn is always a live one. For her, if something is too immediately dirty, it becomes too obvious and she loses interest in it. That’s what makes the ceramics that sit alongside the images so interesting; they take the idea of the sexualised body and place it onto new material, with “Sandy Bum” creating the image of a body emerging from the sea, and “Grabbed By Ass” offering a tongue-in-cheek comment on the ways in which the idea of objectification turns bodies into objects. These sculptures were made under a new name — Willowfuck — which Motoko found through a “sex spam email”. She describes the new name as a way to find freedom in new forms. The sculptures are also a continuation of Motoko’s experiments with collaboration — she also created a photo series with the artist Urara Tsuchiya for the 2022 exhibition On Being An Angel. She says that collaboration “opens up technically what I couldn’t before, it makes me try something new.”
The genesis of Wicked City — the imagery of anime, and Motoko’s continued explorations of the female form — informs what the artist plans to do next with these themes. Her plan is another collaboration, this time with a “3-D anime creator”. The fan culture around anime is vital to this; the artist mentions the culture around zines and fan art: making a copy of an original image in a subjective way that reveals something about the artist. Which someone else then copies and so on and so forth, creating “a copy of a copy of a copy.”
With a laugh, Motoko describes the feeling of seeing one of the paintings from Wicked City (“BBB_4”) appearing as a meme in her Instagram mentions; the absurd exaggerations of the figure used as a comical after shot in a before-and-after image. “It went viral, or something,” she ways – the perfect way for her art to cast its perverse, satiric eye over the culture that went into creating it.
Credits
Images courtesy of Sebastian Gladstone