A bizarre exhibition of Shintaro Kago's horror eroticism

Spaghetti and meatballs?

The high school girls lean in to kiss when their faces split open suddenly, giving way to a mess of worm and eyeball soup dripping to the floor.

This is the world of Shintaro Kago, a Japanese Ero Guro manga artist famous for his "fashionable paranoia" style. This month, he has an exhibition at Parabolica Bis— a small art gallery in the Taito ward of Tokyo that specializes in strange art.

"A perverted postcard of a bondage-style Kiki from the Studio Ghibli movie 'Kiki's Delivery Service' slightly aroused me and simultaneously ruined my childhood."

Ero Guro, or simply Guro as it's sometimes lovingly referred to, is short for Ero Guro Nansensu. That's Japanese katakana-English-speak for Erotic Grotesque Nonsense. It became popular in Japan around the 1930s as a rebellion against an increasingly militarized and conservative society.

Ero Guro evolved from shunga— erotic Japanese woodblock prints featuring kimono-clad lovers getting their freak on throughout the Edo period. Though it remained mostly vanilla— notwithstanding it's depiction of Japanese men with ridiculously huge dicks— some shunga artists flirted with sexier themes. The most recognizable example is Katsushika Hokusai's "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife" which shows a woman having sex with an octopus in what is probably the world's first tentacle porn.

"Water pipe 1"

Guro took this flirtation with the taboo and pushed the boundaries far beyond the realms of what most people could imagine in their wildest fantasies.

Kago's brand of Guro focuses less on the erotic and more on the grotesque nonsense part of it all. Gazing into the eyeballs of a young girl whose face had exploded into blood squirting sink faucets, I found myself asking what the hell I was even looking at. A perverted postcard of a bondage-style Kiki from the Studio Ghibli movie "Kiki's Delivery Service" slightly aroused me and simultaneously ruined my childhood.

The coolest part of Kago's exhibition was his horror and cult-classic film tribute drawings. Trying to match Kago's takes on "Hellraiser," "The Thing," and Lucio Fulci's "The Beyond" with the movies they represented was a real treat. His "Creepshow 2" drawing from the Father's Day story, with candles atop a severed head on a platter, was a spot on.

Tributes included "Alien," "Robocop," "Bodysnatchers," "Total Recall," "Dawn of the Dead," and Two Face from "The Dark Night" among others.

The exhibition only goes until Dec. 20, but in May Kago will host his 9th annual "Shit Film Festival" showcasing bizarre toilet themed short films in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka. The Tokyo edition will be on Friday, May 3, 2019 and the Osaka edition will be on Saturday May 18, 2019. The Nagoya edition does not have a set date yet.

Past Shit Film Festivals

-All photos and text by Randiah Camille Green/Far East Fire © 2018