Her Sex Was Like a Giant Hothouse Flower

2004

The Brooklyn-based artist Megumi Nagai has developed a distinctive technique for painting on polished wood. She often draws forms from traditional Japanese art, and here she uses imagery from Buddhist depictions of Hell combined with the basic structure of a Buddhist mandala. The Japanese term rinne names the cycle of human life, death, and rebirth, known as samsara in Sanskrit. Buddhism teaches that in samsara or rinne, bodily pleasures, represented here by erotic imagery, are distractions that prevent people from escaping to a higher realm.