ART

THE STRANGE JOURNEY OF THE BALL-JOINTED DOLL

from Germany to Japan, an art form that is definitely not for children

By Andie Zhang

Not Your Every Day Average Doll

The first thing you think when you think of a doll is that it is a child’s toy. If you get a bit more specific, you might have the image of a Barbie or a Disney doll in mind. Some girls literally have hundreds of dolls before they are ten years old and the toy industry is a large one, totaling over 21.6 Billion dollars in sales in the United States in 2018 alone. But not all dolls are made to be a toy and some have a decidedly adult cast to them.

I am interested in a subset of dolls called ball-jointed dolls, which are dolls with moving joints. There are many toy dolls that also have moving joints, but with ball-jointed dolls the movement is part of the overall style and aesthetic. The dolls are fantasy objects, uncanny, and decidedly artistic in intent. The history of dolls is too long to go into here, but the sub-history of ball-jointed dolls is not and tells us a great deal about its charm as a sub-genre and how artists have used them for their own artistic practice.

From the late 19th century to early 20th century, the French and the Germans both produced porcelain dolls with moveable joints. They are the precursors to what we see today. Then in the 1930’s, during the period leading up to World War II, the German artist Hans Bellmer started to make life-size female dolls with ball joints and used them in his surrealistic photographs. As a German artist, Bellmer started his doll project to oppose the fascism of the Nazi Party. He made malformed female dolls and used the ball joints to pose them in grotesque ways. It was an attack on the cult of the perfect body which was then in vogue in Germany.

One of Bellmer's Dolls

Bellmer’s dolls are disturbing, erotic, and full of an obvious sadism and they reflect Bellmer’s childhood trauma of living under the fear of a dominating father. Bellmer’s works also show a strong pairing of desire and death. Bellmer produced and published his black-and-white photographs in an anonymous book, The Doll (Die Puppe). These photographs definitely subvert the idea of the doll as a child’s toy. The genre of art that Bellmer unconsciously started continues to this day, but in a country that he never would have guessed: Japan.

Simon Yotsuya is a Japanese doll artist who was born in Tokyo in 1944 at the end of World War II. Yotsuya has had many solo and group exhibitions in Japan and internationally. His major works are on permanent display at the Yotsuya Simon Doll Museum, Sakaide, Japan, since 2004. He also opened the Ecole de Simon, a school of doll making in 1978.

Yotsuya was always interested in dolls and began to make stuffed dolls when he was a teenager. After reading an article in the magazine, Shinfujin, he discovered Bellmer’s work and started making dolls with ball joints. There are three main types of Yotsuya’s dolls and the least disturbing is the boys and girls’ series. All dolls from that series are ordinary looking young boys and girls. They look like innocent young kids. They wear elegant suits and dresses, and have the appearance of well-educated children from an elite private school. These dolls replicate the beauty and innocence of real young people.

The boy dolls have fringe haircut, wear white shirts, bow ties, suit jackets, and short pants. Yotsuya finishes off their outfits with a pair of mid-calf socks and leather shoes. They stand straight and look calm and peaceful. The girl dolls have long curly hair, wear white ball gowns, and have red lips. They look like they are dressed up for a dinner party.

A nice little boy

Another series of his works is more provocative: the mechanical dolls. Those dolls have a part or many parts of their bodies exposed so that we see the inner wood frame structures. Some of them have mechanical parts. These dolls amplify the fact that they are man-made objects and their beauty comes from their sense of incompleteness.

The “Mechanical Girl 1” in the photo below does not have her right arm and only a section of her left lap. Her body is almost sliced in half and shows the wood and mechanical structures inside her torso. Her head is leaning to the left side and her finger is touching her chin. She has an odd, gleaming smile. Even though, the appearance of the mechanical parts is evident and reveals them to be lifeless and mechanical, I find that they are more alive than the lovable boys and girls dolls.

Yotsuya breaks down the normal

The last series is heavenly dolls that have wings or halos that represent angels and Christ, but their bodies have the look of the mechanical doll series. Yotsuya uses distortion in a different way than Bellmer, but they both rely on a twisted view of anatomy, which is perfect for ball-jointed art.

If Yotsuya is the precursor in Japanese ball-jointed doll art, then Ryo Yoshida is the doll artist who carries the ball-jointed doll art to a different stage. Yoshida was born in Kawasaki, Japan, in 1952. He graduated in photography major in a Tokyo Visual Art. After seeing Bellmer and Yotsuya’s work he taught himself to make dolls. He believed that Bellmer was the starting point of doll art.

In 1983, Yoshida opened his own school of doll making: Doll Space Pygmalion. Many famous doll artists studied there such as Mari Shimizu, Isao Okama, and Naruto. Most of Yoshida’s dolls are vivid beautiful young women. The dolls are sometimes naked, though like Yotsuya, Yoshida uses clothes in an interesting manner. Unlike Bellmer or Yotsuya who are death obsessed, Yoshida says that he is fascinated in finding the “life” in his dolls.

Almost alive

Yoshida uses stone, wood, paper, and resin to create his dolls. He sculpts out the body parts of the doll—limbs, torso, and head—and strings wires through vertical holes. After putting the glass eyes into the eye sockets, he paints their faces as if they are wearing make-up. The paint also enhances the tone of the skin and makes them looks like they are in the process of coming to life. Finally, he adds hair and puts all the body parts together using tension cord. Because the body parts are held tight together, the ball joints move freely and can take on life like poses. Yoshida enjoys the moment when he finishes the doll. He compares it to giving birth to a child.

Another famous doll artist who had studied in Yoshida’s doll making school is Etsuko Miura. She also works as an animator. She finished her studies at Doll Space Pygmalion in 2000. Since then she has had almost an exhibition a year. Miura’s works are morbid and have a lot of common with Bellmer’s. Surprisingly, Miura didn’t know about Bellmer when she started making dolls, but she fell in love with his work afterwards. Just like Bellmer, Miura’s loves malformed bodies. Some of her dolls are missing limbs and their bones are twisted or broken. There are also stitches and bandages on some of the dolls that resemble the traces of sadism in Bellmer’s work. A lot of the dolls are skinny, almost anorectic. She sometimes uses leather for the skin, which is rare in doll-making.

Is this even a doll?

In one of her exhibitions, “Eucharist," Miura created a series of dolls mourning the death of her parents. In one of them she deliberately made the eyes to look like her mother’s. She also mixed a little bit of her mother’s bone into the clay to build the dolls. They have a strange mixture of the pained and the divine about them. The thin layer of leather covering their skinny bodies resembles certain ascetic Buddhist monks who make a practice of starving themselves.

One of the most shocking pieces in “Eucharist is a doll on top of a dining table: her belly is huge, cut open for us to see, and filled with food. According to Miura, the food that comes out from the belly is subuta, a dish that her mother always cooked. The position of the tableware shows the position of where her family member usually sat during dinner time. She has said that she wishes that she was that doll, lying on her family’s dining table. If her family could eat her up, she could become part of them and they would always be together. As Bellmer understood, there’s something about dolls that open us up to everyday savagery of the world, or at least our families.

©Andie Zhang band the CCA Arts Review