The Swede Who Inherited the Floating World
In classical Japanese woodblock prints, the genitals were always the biggest thing in the frame. Not background detail—the gravitational center, rendered with the same meticulous care as a wave or a pine tree. That’s not modern provocation; that’s what shunga actually was. Erotic woodblock printing thrived for centuries in Edo-period Japan, passed between hands wrapped in silk, tucked into samurai armor as a ward against death. Art, talisman, and pornography simultaneously, and no one saw a contradiction in that.
The artist Senju Horimatsu—born Matti Sandberg, in Stockholm, in 1968—has spent years trying to inhabit that tradition honestly. He started as a tattoo artist, which makes sense: both practices treat the body as medium and subject, both require a controlled hand and an unshockable eye. His paintings have the washed-ink delicacy of old ukiyo-e, the gold leaf, the soft gradients, the stylized faces. And then the fox spirits get penetrated. The geishas fold open. The proportions go surreal in exactly the way the Edo masters intended.
Japanese folklore gives him plenty to work with. Kitsune—fox spirits—are sexual by nature in the old stories, shapeshifters who seduce travelers and samurai with equal appetite. The creature world of Japanese myth is strange and erotic and violent all at once, and Senju leans into all of it. His figures could plausibly have stepped from an eighteenth-century scroll, if eighteenth-century scrolls had been printed in full color with this level of anatomical commitment.
That he’s a Swedish man named Matti who learned this through tattoo needles rather than calligraphy brushes could be read as appropriation. I’m not particularly interested in that argument. The work earns its references by understanding them—not just aesthetically but structurally. Shunga was always about excess and directness; sanitized, tasteful shunga would be the actual betrayal. Pornography predates the printing press by a comfortable margin, and some art is better when it makes you a little ashamed of how interested you are.