Goddess Images
In the midst of a search for representations of posthuman women I found instead a remarkable gallery of divinities. Just two examples:
and
They are the work of Chinese artist Li Zhuang Ping (b. 1948), and gorgeous as they are there is just a little bit of controversy about them because the model for all of them, it turns out, is his own foster daughter Li Qin. Father and daughter:
Now over in a certain flyspeck Asian jurisdiction where guy-on-guy buttsex can still land you in prison for two years I have found an earnest, earnest debate going on about how immoral this might or might not be (complete with those hilarious, kinker-that-it-would-without-them black censor boxes over Li Qin’s ladyparts — another view here). It all makes me thank Great Cthulhu for my own metaethical views which leave me looking at these pictures with…enjoyment.
And maybe just a speck of reverence.
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These pictures are beautiful as is the model who features in them. I read the article you linked too, its such a shame that some people assume that this man is some kind of sexual deviant when as far as I am concerned he is an artist who saw beauty and wanted to paint it.
Mollyxxx
I can’t judge the the man aversely. Are nudist families immoral? Are primitive tropical tribes going to hell because they are comprised of immodest families? Is it okay for a doctor to view the undressed body of young children? What if the doctor is the child’s father? Can you even bathe your own kids?
There are similarities here to the ordeals that Andrew Wyeth and his young model, Helga (seen here painted when Wyeth was sixty years old: http://www.theg...s.jpg ), suffered after it was revealed that he had secretly painted the married woman nude, while he himself was also married.
Tongues wagged, and it didn’t help that she took care of him in his old age, or that he described her pubic hair as “enticing” in his autobiography.
Before the famous “Helga” series of well over two hundred paintings and drawings, he painted Siri Erickson, at the tender age of fifteen, in a work he titled “The Virgin” (1969), and again naked in “Indian Summer” in 1970, this time focusing on her backside.
When asked about his reaction to criticism, he stated, “People only make you swerve. I won’t show anybody anything I’m working on. If they hate it, it’s a bad thing, and if they like it, it’s a bad thing. An artist has to be ingrown to be any good.”
Virginia photographer Sally Mann photographed her own natural daughter nude on many occasions, and in fact, published a book of 65 photos of her three children, skinny-dipping, while all under the age of ten.
Despite the child pornography controversies, far from being prosecuted, she was recently honored in a retrospective show at the rather conservative Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia.
Wyeth, also never prosecuted, was later honored by now ex-President George W. Bush in 2007 with the National Medal of Arts an award created by Congress and is known as the highest honor conferred to an individual artist on behalf of the people.
An awful lot of beautiful images were created by these artists. I’m glad we have them.