Reagan Louie, photographs of Asian sex workers
Photographer Reagan Louie has an exhibition called "Sex Work in Asia" on display at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Louie's work has been written up recently in Salon, the New York Times and the San Jose Mercury News.
Louie, a professor of photography at the San Francisco Art Institute, spent six years photographing the Asian sex trade in China, Japan, Korea, Thailand and other places throughout Southeast Asia. A Chinese-American, he has said he wanted to disabuse himself of Western stereotypes about the sexuality of Asian women and to explore the nature of sexual relations between Asian women and men.
He said he chose to focus on the sex industry because relations there are, as he puts it in the book, "heightened, more visually displayed." Yet another purpose, he added, was to look at identity and the role playing that always have been part of selling sex.
(A cynic might also note that art photographs of naked women sell better than art photographs of construction workers on skyscrapers. Not that there's anything wrong with that.) Two good gallery essays about Louie's work with single photos here and here. Artnet has five thumbnailed images (flaky site, try hitting "refresh" if you get an error page). Nerve also has a Louie gallery (available only to paid subscribers).
