COLLECTION NAME:
Graduate Thesis Collection
Record
Title:
Fuyuko Matsui's Death Paintings of the Woman's Corpse as Contemporary Feminist Art
Creator:
Starnes, Matthew Richard
Subject:
Thesis (M.A.) – Art History
Subject:
Savannah College of Art and Design -- Department of Art History
Rights:
Copyright is retained by the authors or artists of items in this collection, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.
Abstract:
“This thesis analyzes contemporary Japanese artist Fuyuko Matsui (b. 1974), who creates images of women’s corpses experiencing stages of decomposition. Despite the artist’s dismissal of those connections, her work can be read as feminist and is useful in contemporary discussions of feminist art in the twenty-first century. Considering Matsui’s theoretical inspirations and her masterful visual language creates an opportunity to describe and dissect her portrayals of women as contemporary feminist art. This critical analysis of Matsui’s artistic process discusses the nihonga style, which emulates traditional Japanese artistic practices by using color pigment, silk, controlled line work, and a hanging scroll mounting. Nihonga paintings traditionally depict nature scenes, animals, and the idealized, picturesque Japanese landscape. Matsui uses nihonga materials and compositional elements to connect her art with her Japanese culture and revitalize the art practice. Concepts of ruination also permeate Matsui’s work as the woman’s corpse is destroyed both externally and internally through violent disembowelment, animals ripping the flesh, and psychological trauma. In Matsui’s paintings, this destruction of the body is a reinvention of kusōzu, or death painting, a Japanese art practice with its origins in the thirteenth century, CE. Kusōzu illustrates nine stages of bodily deterioration through the artist’s observance of a woman’s decaying corpse. This category of Japanese Buddhist art first appeared as mounted hangings or handscrolls and functions as a meditative tool for monks to achieve enlightenment. Kusōzu’s portrayals of decomposing woman’s corpses promotes the monk’s contemplation of human transience. This meditative act falls within the Buddhist mental practice of upaya kaushalya, or the skillful means of explaining moral truths wherein enlightened ends are justified by otherwise immoral means. Viewers gain moral enlightenment by visualizing the destruction of the woman’s body while practicing upaya kaushalya. By referencing kusōzu, Matsui’s art recontextualizes the destruction of the woman’s body within a contemporary, secular lens that gives autonomy in death back to the corpse and away from patriarchal religious utilization. The artist embodies upaya kaushalya by reanimating the perished woman’s body which brings contemporary feminist truths to the death painting tradition. The decaying woman is no longer a tool for masculine spirituality, but a symbolic narrative for the experience of womanhood and feminine power.” –Abstract
Keywords: corpse, death, decay, decomposition, feminism, Fuyuko Matsui, kusōzu, nihonga, ruination, upaya kaushalya, violence.
Keywords: corpse, death, decay, decomposition, feminism, Fuyuko Matsui, kusōzu, nihonga, ruination, upaya kaushalya, violence.
Publisher:
Savannah, Georgia : Savannah College of Art and Design
Date:
2024-05
Format:
1 online resource: 1 PDF (Thesis, 58 pages, color illustrations)