See photographs taken inside Japanese love hotels exploring female desire

Today’s culture is oversaturated with sexual images. The way we perceive body and sex is inevitably shaped by films, literature, advertising, and pornography. Gradually, even our own private nakedness becomes a performance, and the performance becomes second nature. This is particularly true for women: in the cultural landscape shaped by the male gaze, we’re constantly aware of how we are supposed to perform to appear beautiful, seductive, and sexy. These preconceptions are exactly what artist Ekaterina Bazhenova-Yamasaki explores and seeks to dismantle in her recently released zine, Memory Turned Into Flesh.

Ekaterina Bazhenova-Yamasaki has been looking at the female body and desire in her practice for over a decade. Last year, she headed to Japan where femininity is incredibly codified, and sexuality is surrounded by myths like nowhere else. Her latest book is a visual journey through Tokyo’s love hotels and porn sets which offers a female perspective on sex in Japanese culture.

“I have become friends with a girl who works for the major adult film company in Japan. When I met her for the first time, I had no clue that she worked in porn,” the photographer remembers. “Some of Japanese adult film companies use love hotels as a filming location. For the project, all the girls were shot in different love hotels in Tokyo. Some rooms were quite old and dirty, with traces of blood, semen, and the smell of cigarettes. Some rooms were lush and playful: rotating beds, mirrored ceilings and floors, sex toys, and a magnifying mirror as a ‘fuck station’. These places offer two hours of cheaply constructed escapism for $80. As dark as it is, love hotels are also known as one of the most popular places to commit suicide in Japan. I guess sex and death go together.”

Based in LA, Ekaterina Bazhenova-Yamasaki has spent the past 10 years in London, but her work has a long-lasting connection with Japan. She first visited the country in 2011 and has since spent a lot of time exploring not only cities but also rural areas and remote islands. After her visit to Tokyo last January, she started working on a project about the female body in contemporary society. For Room 207, the first zine of the Japanese trilogy, she photographed women she met online in love hotels, seeking to portray not only these particular spaces but the broader experience of intimacy in a contemporary city. The second zine, Memory Turned Into Flesh, is much more visceral. “I wanted to keep it more raw, private, more real, and less poetic,” says Bazhenova-Yamasaki. “I explored the connection between flesh and nudity, between nudity and the presentation of seduction, and between seduction and femininity, and the way it’s executed and performed.”

In the book, nudes are juxtaposed with close-ups of sex-related advertising in the city streets, plants, snakes, and food. “Food is an extremely intimate aspect of our life, just as sex is. I personally find it interesting how capitalism sexualises food starting from the packaging,” she adds.

For Bazhenova-Yamasaki, the interest in Asian femininity comes from her fascination with Japanese cinematography, but also her own heritage of growing up in Russia. Similarly very different, Russian culture shares a lot with Japan when it comes to the treatment of the female body. “It is very similar when it comes to treating the female body as a commodity or an investment. Women face a lot of public rules when it comes to the presentation of gender: body gestures, tone of voice, choice of clothes. Both countries have extreme patriarchy which regards the female body as the most commercial product,” she explains.

“I explored the connection between flesh and nudity, between nudity and the presentation of seduction, and between seduction and femininity, and the way it’s executed and performed” – Ekaterina Bazhenova-Yamasaki

In the book, Bazhenova-Yamasaki’s take on explicit nudity is informed by rich cultural tradition but also appears fresh and radical. Control clearly belongs to women in the pictures: they’re aware not only of the photographer but also of the viewer, they’re performing for the camera and for you – but strictly on their terms. In the era of increasing censorship of the female body on different online platforms and even social media, this female-centred artistic take on sex is very much needed. It proves that having the desire and being desired doesn’t take away from your personal and artistic agency.

"It’s really hard to break this stigma around being naked. When working on this zine, I was afraid to select certain images, because they would to be treated straight away as pornographic. If we take away all the aesthetic and beauty of the female representation, it can be misinterpreted very easily,” the photographer adds. “In the end, this book is about the aesthetic of the flesh, and about the balancing act women perform: between the sensual and the ideal, force and sublimation.”