Articles tagged: Art

Japanese aesthetics finds beauty in the imperfect, the simple, and the ephemeral, and it has transformed with each stage of its history. Following that evolution from tradition to modernity helps us understand where the aesthetics of shibari comes from and why it keeps changing.

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes.

By now, Hajime Kinoko’s name is well known, even beyond the shibari scene.

The International Shibari Film Festival (ISFF) held its first edition on July 2 at the Cinéma Aventure in Brussels. It was organized by the Belgian collective Atelier Mae and served as the opening night of Graines de Cordes III, a four-day gathering held in Namur.

In July 2026, the online publication Kinbaku Today presented an archive of historical Japanese SM magazines, with issues from the fifties and sixties that can be viewed online.

Suma Toshiyuki (須磨利之, 1920–1992), known professionally as Minomura Kou (美濃村晃) and also as Kita Reiko (喜多玲子), was a Japanese editor and visual artist and a pioneer of kinbaku.

Far from B- or Z-grade productions, Murder on D Street (D坂の殺人事件) is a true work of art.

Shibari is riddled with myths, that is, with mistaken ideas and falsehoods that, over time, come to be accepted without question.

A clay bowl, made by a craftsman in his workshop, is bought at the market for a few euros and used at home to eat soup.

Whenever I hear someone’s work described as “an artist in shibari,” I have my doubts. If it is already hard to do good shibari, or to create a quality piece of art, combining the two multiplies the difficulty.

Kita Reiko (喜多玲子), a pseudonym of Minomura Kou (美濃村晃), is the creator of this illustration titled Ten Positions of a Naked Tied Woman and one of the great reference figures in the history of shibari.