The Love Hotel Artist: Momoko Ishihara
Love hotels sprouted in the 70s in all their gaudy glory.
Gregarious bedrooms dominated by turning beds and heart-shaped bathtubs invited newlyweds and secretive couples, offering secluded spaces for sensual indulgences and lovey-dovey embraces - or so were they marketed. Japan’s many vintage love hotels were promoted as one-night paradises and generously decorated in lofty kitsch memorabilia, like intricate ceiling trims, cherubins, and a sickly sweet combination of silk and lace.
The love hotel is slowly dissipating into business-casual rooms, dressed in its most basic bedroom decor with orange wallpaper and crisp white bed sheets. Artist Momoko Ishihara mourns this wary contemporary “greige” attack on love hotels by expressing her femininity, self-love, and self-expression through capturing the fleeting essence of the saccharine love hotel, as we used to know it.
Born in 1992, she was charmed by the memories left by the Showa era as she watched old TV series with her parents as a child. It’s through a yearning for womanhood, neon lights, and beauty that she found herself attached to the love hotel subculture. As she explored them during her teenage years, love hotels became a second home.
Model, actress, photographer, Momoko Ishihara is a multifaceted enchantress, but she feels most like herself in her lusty lingerie love hotel portraits: conveying the beauty of this near-extinction safe haven for lovers, Ishihara holds near her heart the glimmer of these cheap rooms. Japan is not particularly talkative about sex, but Ishihara hopes to change this. To her, sexuality is a whole other universe, containing laughter-filled escapades, heartbreak, secret exchanges, and overall, human connection.
But nothing evokes more awe than her velvety, crystalline portraits. The pin-up touch of the pictures, Showa-style, transcends not only adulthood’s nightlife, but somehow nostalgia and utmost freedom.
About the Author:
Mizuki Khoury
Born in Montreal, based in Tokyo. Sabukaru’s senior writer and works as an artist under Exit Number Five.
