Henmaru Machino

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Henmaru Machino (町野変丸 Machino Henmaru, sometimes given as 'Hanmaru', born 1969, Aomori Prefecture) is a Japanese artist whose works prominently feature themes of dysmorphic hermaphrodism and body transformation, as well as dozens of other sexual paraphilia. Most of his work has emerged within a paradigm of Hentai manga and images, but some has appeared in galleries; several of his pieces were part of Takashi Murakami's traveling Superflat exhibition. While Machino's work defies any easy categorization, it could be said to fall within the Japanese EroGuro (Erotic Grotesque) school, still somewhat loosely defined, which dates back to Dada-influenced, Showa-era Decadence. Some assert that it is pornography of the most extreme variety, and nothing more. While porn-or-art debates have been occurring around a wide variety of works for centuries across the globe, the debates surrounding Machino are unique in that his subject matter is at the far fringes of human sexual experience, and even beyond it, in that much of what he draws could never occur in the real world. While many EroGuro artists create works that could have real-world analogues (S&M, mutilation, etc.), Machino's images of, for example, girls with dozens of phalli sprouting from each of the dozens of breasts that cover their body, are not something any viewer of his work could ever see in life, and thus the issue of "what is pornography?" strongly preempts the issue of "art or pornography?" in most of his work.