Conquer Club

Shabani: The making of a metrosexual gorilla

Since March, Japanese women have been swooning over a gorilla called Shabani in the Higashiyama Zoo and Botanical Gardens. It's not the first time Japanese popular culture has fallen in love with a large inarticulate creature.

This week Western media picked up the story and the sensitive, nurturing gorilla of the Japanese imagination became a hunky beast. The BBC's Yuko Kato looks at the bizarre anthropomorphic language used in Japan and the West in the making of this "metrosexual" gorilla.

It was the sensitive eyes and hauntingly good looks that caught the imagination of young, female Japanese zoo-goers.

While chest-thumping ferocity is normally associated with the gorilla, what caught the Japanese imagination is rather different.

Visitors began posting photos on social media back in March this year, commenting on his brooding good looks.

Since then, Shabani has been a regular in domestic news and social media and the words they have used are interesting.

Ikemen: It's the Japanese slang for "handsome guy". The word is a combination of "I-ke" (pronounced "ee-kay"), which is an abbreviation of a word meaning "cool" or just "good", and "men" derived from the English.

But it was when the zoo said Shabani was a good and responsible dad to his two young children that the other words come in.

Ikumen: Another slang word meaning "a hands-on dad who looks after his children" - "iku" being an abbreviation of the word "iku-ji" which means "raising children".

Shabani was shaping up in Japanese social media as the perfect role model for the modern Japanese male.

A Chinese artist who performed a sexual act in public in Beijing has been sent to a labor camp for one year for "disturbing public order." Cheng Li's lawyer claimed he would appeal for an administrative review of the punishment, according to Beijing News report on May 9.

The 57-year-old artist from Lanzhou, Gansu province, performed his work Art Prostitution by having intercourse with his female partner during a performance art show named Sensitive Zone at the Beijing Modern Art Gallery in March. The show was open to invited professional artists only.

"Cheng is a noted performance artist in the (art) community," said lawyer Wang Zhenyu, representing Cheng. "He was invited to the exhibition to perform there and he did it following the schedule of the exhibition. Although it was called an exhibition, it was not a public event; rather an internal communication between insiders."

According Guo Zhenming, a friend of the artist, Cheng was detained by police on March 23. On April 25 police informed his lawyer that Cheng was to spend one year in a labor camp as punishment for his performance.

Wang told Beijing News that Cheng would appeal for an administrative review. "We'll find some artists to justify Cheng's act," Wang said, adding that Cheng was "surprised" to learn about his punishment because his wife also understood and supported her husband's art.

"He talked to me about his plan beforehand," said Cheng's wife, who requested her full name not be used. "From what I was told by other people, I can't see that he did anything that crossed the boundary from art (into crime). I understand him," she said, according to China Daily.

Cheng Li, a Chinese performance artist, has been sentenced to a year of "re-education" through labor, after engaging in unsimulated sex with a female partner as part of an art show at the Contemporary Art Exhibition Hall in Beijing. The live performance piece, titled "Art Whore," is intended to be a thinly-veiled metaphor for the prostitution of the art world. In fact, there are no veils at all. Cheng explained that the impetus behind his act is the idea that "the popular trend of commercializing art is nothing but a trade of sex for commercial benefits."

Cheng's act included sex scenes on a balcony, and in the exhibition hall's basement. Three days after the March 20 Eyes Wide Shut-like performance, Cheng and fellow artists were rounded up by local police, with Cheng subsequently being convicted for inciting disorder due to his "nude pornographic performance." If a few shutterbugs and quiet onlookers is considered disorder, then I guess they have a point. Cheng's attorney, Wang Zhenyu, is applying for administrative reconsideration. If that's denied, he'll then file an administrative appeal.

Getting the Lenny Bruce treatment would be expected here, and, it's sad to say but, "only" getting a year seems like getting off lightly by Chinese standards. Coming in the wake of last month's detention of China's most famous artist, Ai Weiwei, for his outspoken politics, it's encouraging to see artists like Cheng continue to express themselves, despite the consequences that may ensue from living under a repressive regime. Wang said, "We want other artists to identify with Cheng's action and invite legal scholars to clearly define the relationship between the arts and the law."