Explicit Tradition

I found Senju Horimatsu through some rabbit hole online—I forget where—and his work stayed with me. Swedish, born in Stockholm in 1968, real name Matti Sandberg. He started as a tattoo artist, then moved into prints that sit between contemporary practice and shunga, those old Japanese erotic woodblocks. The comparison isn’t perfect, but the intention is clear: he’s making sexually explicit art in the visual language and with the technical skill of something centuries old and formally revered.

What strikes me is the directness of it. Oversized genitals rendered in meticulous detail, fox spirits and mythological creatures caught in sex acts, geishas drawn with the care old shunga masters brought to their blocks. No irony. No winking. No attempt to provoke or philosophize. Just: this is what I want to make, and I’m going to make it well.

Japanese folklore is soaked in sexuality anyway—spirits seducing humans, trickster gods, the works. We’ve decided those old stories are precious and austere, but they’re often horny if you actually read them. Samurai weren’t prudish. So there’s something right about making erotic work in that tradition instead of treating sexuality like it’s too refined to acknowledge. The shame is all retrospective, something we invented later.

I haven’t seen the work in person. I’m not sure I want to—there’s something about the screen that lets me focus on the technical skill without the weight of confronting it directly. But I respect it. The work takes desire and the body seriously, grants them the formal rigor usually reserved for untouchable subjects. No hedge, no distance, no apology.