Shunga at the British Museum

It’s extraordinary to think that Japan was pretty well isolated until the latter half of the 19th century. Even more extraordinary is that during this time, a strand in Japanese art depicted and celebrated sex- and in the most graphic fashion, too.

Known as shunga, which translates as spring pictures, they can be now seen in the British Museum as part of Japan 400, a series of events that celebrate 400 years of Japan-British relations. Scrolls, screens, prints, books, they’re all sexual in content; produced from 1600 to 1900, they remain incredibly explicit. Look at the top of a shunga and you might see a couple in a romantic clinch; look down, and you’ll see vast, exaggerated genitalia sprouting like predatory plants.

Shunga were produced by artists in what the Japanese called ukiyo-e, ‘floating world', which means roughly the twilight world of sex and pleasure. They were popular. Across Japan, men and women alike enjoyed them, and great artists such as Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) (he of the Great Wave painting) made shunga.

So how did erotic art become such a big part of the visual diet of Japanese people for three centuries? Partly because in Japan the same divisions between ‘art’ and ‘pornography’ didn’t exist for all manner of religious and social reasons; also because shunga found a sweet spot between public and private life, and also because censorship didn’t exist in the same way. You could borrow shunga from lending-libraries.

Not that Japan was licentious, or even liberal. Citizens were expected to adhere to serious and loyal Confucian ethics- Japan remains highly dutiful country. By the end of the 19th century, shunga had been clamped down upon, although western artists like Toulouse Lautrec, Picasso and  Aubrey Beardsley had seen and been influenced by them.

Such exotic and even shocking imagery is not a first for the British Museum. In 1995 it staged the exhibition The Passionate Art of Utamaro, featuring shunga, and the museum is committed to showing its 30,000-object strong Japanese collection, Part of the impetus comes from curator Timothy Clark, who has co-authored a book called Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art (The British Museum Press, 2013).

As to the shunga, it finally did prove too strong and was banned in Japan for much of the 20th century, although some reckon it’s found a new expression in the sexier end of Manga cartoons. But any under-16s emboldened by this comparison should remember: at the BM you’ll have to be accompanied by your parents.

Tickets: £7 (£5 concessions/ £3.50 National Art Pass)