English Statemene

SAMURAI TECHNIQUES (SMT48): Art Statement 2021–2025

48 Bodies, Faces in ≤3 Pixels, and Infinite Questions

— Full Statement (English Translation) —

SAMURAI TECHNIQUES (SMT48)

48 Bodies, Faces in at Most 3 Pixels, Infinite Questions

Prologue: Numbers That Speak to Japan’s Contradictions

In 2021, I began making works that simultaneously depict SEX, SAMURAI, and shunga (erotic ukiyo‑e) in pixel art. Why did I make them? Even I didn’t have a clear reason at the time. I was simply powerfully drawn to this combination, and I kept facing my smartphone screen, working with a single thumb.

Four years later, looking back now, perhaps these works reflected the era’s unconscious.

According to the latest market research (SDKI Analytics, 2024), Japan’s adult video (AV)–related market for adult moving‑image content reaches about 6.1 billion USD (roughly 900 billion JPY). As these figures suggest, Japan’s adult‑content industry is said to have a substantial global presence.

At the same time, however, a survey by the Japan Family Planning Association reported that 47.2% of married couples were in a “sexless” state—no sexual intercourse for more than a month (2020). In the latest 2024 survey, this share rose sharply to about 64.2%. Roughly 70% of unmarried men aged 18–34 have no romantic partner (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 2021).

What do these diverging numbers mean? Excess in the virtual and scarcity in reality. Digital satiation and bodily hunger. Perhaps the compulsion that drove me to create SMT48 was an unconscious response to this contradiction.

If we turn back to the Edo period, our ancestors sublimated sex into art in the form of shunga. It was not mere pornography but a comprehensive art form containing laughter, surprise, and beauty. Kitagawa Utamaro, Katsushika Hokusai, Utagawa Kuniyoshi—giants whose names remain in Japanese art history—depicted sex earnestly and at times humorously.

And then there is the Forty‑Eight Techniques (shijūhatte). This systematization of positions is, alongside India’s Kama Sutra and China’s bedroom arts (fangzhongshu), one of the world’s rare cultures of sexual “techniques.” Interestingly, in Japan sumo also has its own “Forty‑Eight Techniques,” codified in the same era in Edo.

Just as sumo’s forty‑eight techniques defined forms of strength and skill, the erotic forty‑eight techniques defined forms of love. Japanese culture has developed “ways” (dō) that elevate bodily practices—tea ceremony, flower arrangement, martial arts—into spiritual cultivation, while also developing systems of “techniques” (jutsu) such as sumo winning moves and the erotic forty‑eight.

Whereas a “way” is never‑ending spiritual training, “techniques” are concrete accumulations of skill. Many such skills are systematized as kata—forms that are transmitted. Shunga sublimated sex as art, and the Forty‑Eight Techniques systematized sex as technique. This duality—artistic sublimation and technical systematization—is the richness of Japanese culture.

Yet from the Meiji Restoration to contemporary Japan, where did this creative sexual culture go? It was hidden behind mosaics, driven underground as something shameful, or over‑commodified to the point of losing its original vitality.

Chapter 1: The Revelation of Pixel Art

The work began with a choice of method. Pixel art—at the moment I chose this format, images of SEX, SAMURAI, and shunga arrived simultaneously.

Why pixel art? Because it is the smallest unit of expression in today’s digital culture and at the same time a sign of nostalgia for the Famicom generation of the 1980s. The newest and the most nostalgic form—this ambivalence, I intuited, could become a bridge between tradition and innovation.

In 2021, CryptoPunks were trading for hundreds of millions of yen. Ten thousand 24×24‑pixel faces were shaking up the art market. My interest, however, was not in speculative value but in the primal power of this ultra‑reduced expression. I wanted to test the challenge of representing the human being with the fewest pixels possible on the most human act: sexuality.

And as a Japanese artist, when I considered how to express sexuality to the world, shunga and the SAMURAI rose to mind. These are elements unique to Japan yet already recognizable as cultural signifiers globally. Without falling into Orientalism and without becoming stateless, they were elements I could present proudly as a proposal from Japan.

Once I began, I was surprised that no matter how complex the position, it could be rendered within a 32×32 frame. The plasticity of the human body, the expressive power of pixels. Constraints generate creativity. This resonates with the spirit of haiku and tanka: the rediscovery of a Japanese aesthetic that aims to express the maximum with the minimum.

Chapter 2: The Smartphone as Canvas

This work was made on a smartphone. Using an app called 8bit Painter, with a single thumb, on a small screen. This peculiar production environment is deeply tied to the essence of the work. Not a PC’s large monitor, but a small screen in the palm of the hand. Not a mouse or tablet, but the thumb—the most primitive tool. This was not accidental but inevitable.

After collapsing into a nap from exhaustion, I could continue working in the same posture. Lying in bed, holding the phone close to my face, placing pixels with my thumb. This intimate distance and bodily directness echo the intimacy of sex itself.

Outlining, placing the eyes, adding the mouth, then fill‑in. To eliminate waste in particular with outlines, I rested my eyes repeatedly and redrew extensively. This repetition was a meditative act akin to a monk rotating prayer beads. Focusing consciousness on each pixel, imagining the whole while constructing the parts—a kind of mandala‑making for the digital age.

Smartphone production also symbolizes the democratization of creation today. No expensive equipment or specialized environment is needed. With a device everyone has, one can work anywhere—on a train, in a café, in bed late at night. The boundary between everyday life and creation dissolves.

Roughly 800 hours of production. This vast duration is a crystallization of human time and labor that can never inhabit an AI‑generated image produced in an instant. The distance between eyes and screen was about 30 cm. This intimate distance is close to reading or needlework—but the substrate is neither paper nor fabric, it is luminous pixels. My posture while working was unique as well: lying in bed, holding the phone above my face. The fatigue of the arm resisting gravity is part of the work.

Chapter 3: A Universe of 32×32

32×32 pixels. 1,024 squares. Within this extreme constraint I depict 48 positions. This constraint is not merely technical. Just as haiku expresses the universe within 5‑7‑5 and Noh expresses human passion with limited gestures, I sought to express the entirety of human desire with 1,024 pixels.

Immediately I faced the impossibility of realism. At 32×32, anatomical accuracy is unattainable. Not only fingers and toes but even facial expressions cannot be drawn. This limitation instead revealed the essence.

What is intercourse? Two bodies intertwining. What minimal elements are required to express its essence? My answer: “form” and “relation.” Not the details of individual bodies, but the overall shape created by two bodies—the tension and harmony that shape produces.

Intriguingly, the very notion of pixels is a modern visual language only understandable after the digital revolution of the 1980s. People in the Edo period, even if shown SMT48, would not see it as we do. This time‑bound format positions the work squarely as 21st‑century contemporary art. Pixel art is an aesthetic shared only by those living in a particular era.

Along with form and relation, I aimed for minimal color. Initially I intended to use only a few colors. But the “kata” of the traditional Forty‑Eight Techniques did not allow such purism.

The basic palette consists of six colors—black outlines; the traditional warm skin tones of shunga (slightly darker warm tone for the male, slightly lighter warm tone for the female); red for the mouth; cherry‑pink for nipples; and samurai’s light blue for the shaved pate (sakayaki).

Then there are the props required by certain traditional techniques—Go board, rope. To represent these I added more colors: dark brown and ochre. I prioritized the completeness of the kata over chromatic purity.

This choice is not a compromise but the essence of the work. SMT48 is not an experiment for minimalism’s sake; it is an homage to the tradition of the Forty‑Eight Techniques.

Chapter 4: The Philosophy of Faces in at Most Three Pixels

All faces are rendered with at most three pixels. This decision is core to the work. Two pixels for the eyes, one for the mouth; at times two pixels, at times only one. This extreme reduction can be seen as a contemporary interpretation of Noh masks. Though expressionless, a Noh mask changes with angle to convey joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure. The faces in SMT48, through context, evoke many emotions.

The contrast between bodies entwined in intensity and faces reduced to the minimum produced effects beyond expectation. It is not the absence of expression but a blank that contains all possible expressions. Viewers project their own feelings—pleasure, rapture, stillness, transcendence—into that void.

This reduction is also the essence of digital‑era communication: emoticons like ":)"; emojis like "😊"; stickers. We routinely reduce feelings to signs. The faces of SMT48 push this semiotics to the limit.

Equally intriguing is the existence of positions where the face is entirely absent. Amid violently interwoven bodies, faces are buried, not represented as pixels at all. This goes beyond extreme simplification to the disappearance of the face—the ultimate anonymity.

The absence of the face may be the most intimate moment: bodies so close they merge and the individual vanishes, leaving only the pure “relation.” This embodies the Japanese aesthetic of “mu” (nothingness)—presence emphasized through absence.

Zero pixels, one pixel, two pixels, three pixels—the staged appearance and disappearance of the face becomes a gradient indicating degrees of intimacy. The disappearance of the face at the most intense moment visually renders the loss of the ego in ecstasy.

Chapter 5: Three Aesthetics—Overflowing, Harmonizing, Condensing

When I made the pieces, I followed unconscious impulses; four years later I can clearly see it was a response to the era’s unconscious. And in 2025, presenting them as contemporary art, I reconstrued these elements intentionally and gave them strategic meanings.

The Aesthetic of Bodies Overflowing

Bodies that push to break the 32×32 frame: an image of surplus life force and torrents of energy. Passion that cannot fit inside the frame connects to the Japanese “beauty of disruption,” the dynamic beauty that arises from breaking perfect form.

The Aesthetic of Bodies Harmonizing

Bodies that fit perfectly within the frame: the design principle of Japanese gardens—representing the universe within a limited space. Every element sits where it must, and not a single pixel is wasted. This marks the “completion of the kata.”

The Aesthetic of Bodies Condensing

Bodies condensed at the center of the frame, surrounded by margin: this embodies the aesthetics of ink painting and the tea room—the culture of ma (interval). The unpainted area has meaning equal to the painted. It is the acme of minimalism and the practice of “the aesthetics of subtraction.” The margin is not empty but a space of possibility.

These patterns were not planned. They emerged naturally while creating forty‑eight bodies. Perhaps the aesthetic etched unconsciously in me as a Japanese person surfaced naturally through a new digital medium. It was an unconscious manifestation of three vectors within Japanese art—dynamic, static, and empty.

Chapter 6: Why the Name SAMURAI TECHNIQUES

The samurai is the embodiment of bushidō.

Bushidō is symbolized by the Hagakure phrase “the way of the warrior is found in death,” yet this is not a mere fixation on dying; paradoxically, by facing death it is a philosophy that sharpens life. Likewise, shunga celebrates life through sex while holding the transience of “once‑in‑a‑lifetime” moments.

This duality—resolve toward death and praise of life—gives the work its unique tension.

The choice of the word “TECHNIQUES” is deliberate. I avoided “48 positions” or “48 ways,” because this is not a catalog of poses but a refined system of techniques.

Technique derives from the Greek technē, meaning the knowing‑how of making at a time when art and craft were undivided. Like the potter’s wheel in ceramics or the kata system in Noh, it aligns with the Japanese jutsu—as in bujutsu (martial techniques), ninjutsu, bōchūjutsu (bedroom arts)—a unity of practical knowledge and spirit. It is not mere methodology but living wisdom acquired through body and mind.

The system of the Forty‑Eight Techniques shares a structure with the kata of martial arts—the sword kata, the grips of jujutsu, and the erotic forty‑eight. All are systematized as techniques and become objects of training and refinement. The spirit of pushing bodily possibility to its limits and finding beauty and harmony therein is common to all.

Historically, samurai and shunga are not contradictions. In Edo, shunga was cherished by the warrior class. More than sexual entertainment, it was also “laughing pictures” that eased tension and auspicious talismans wishing for safe return from the battlefield. For warriors, shunga was a hymn to life lived alongside death.

When SAMURAI and TECHNIQUES combine, a deep stratum of Japanese culture surfaces: those who gaze at death sublimate the summit of life into art. The samurai who faced a tomorrowless life in battle returned to confirm the joy of living. This cycling between life and death may be essential to being human.

SAMURAI TECHNIQUES seals, within the modern minimal unit of 1,024 pixels, a compendium of the embodied knowledge nurtured by Japanese culture. It is a vessel that embraces contradictions—death and life, moment and eternity, individual and kata—without resolving them.

Chapter 7: The Lineage of Abbreviation from Ukiyo‑e

Tracing SMT48’s aesthetic sources leads first to ukiyo‑e, a revolutionary popular art. Thanks to woodblock printing, multiple impressions could be pulled from a single block. This technical property liberated art from elites and opened it to the common people.

Thus, in contrast to the traditional ownership structures of Western art, Japan formed a different cultural trajectory—an indigenous “democratization of art.” Digital art, intrinsically reproducible, shares this nature. Once data is created it can, in theory, be copied infinitely. This is no coincidence; both media possess the potential to democratize art through technology.

Yet what SMT48 inherits most strongly from ukiyo‑e is its formal quality. Ukiyo‑e defines shapes with clear contour lines and constructs worlds by layering a limited number of color blocks. Depth is not built on perspective but on planar composition—relations of line and plane.

SMT48 similarly defines bodies with black pixel outlines and fills them with flat color. It rejects volumetric shading and commits to pure flatness. As ukiyo‑e converted the physical constraint of the woodblock into a unique aesthetic, I embraced the 32×32 constraint as the essence of expression.

Derived from ukiyo‑e, Hokusai’s Hokusai Manga pushed the expressive power of line to its limit—a compendium of abbreviation capturing all things—people, animals, landscapes, yokai—with concise strokes. Reducing complex reality to minimum lines: this “aesthetics of abbreviation” lies at Japanese art’s core.

Tellingly, the Japanese language itself followed a similar path—from complex kanji to the flowing hiragana: from 「安」 to 「あ」, from 「以」 to 「い」. This simplification was not mere convenience; it yielded new expressive possibilities. Hiragana expresses delicate shades of feeling that kanji cannot.

SMT48’s 32×32 pixels are a 21st‑century development of that lineage. As Hokusai captured motion with a single brushstroke, I sought to capture the essence of the body with a single pixel. Faces in at most three pixels resonate with Hokusai’s figures whose expressions are rendered with dots and lines.

To abbreviate is not to lose; it is an active creative act that highlights essence. 1,024 pixels are crystals of pure form remaining after infinite detail is pared away.

Chapter 8: From NFT to Contemporary Art—A Return from Speculation to Expression

SMT48 was born amid the NFT boom. My concern, however, was not speculation or community building, but the pure potential of digital art.

Many NFT projects attempted to create value through schemas of allowlists, utility, and roadmaps. I wanted to compete on visual force alone—the sheer formal impact of forty‑eight bodies and faces in at most three pixels.

In 2025 I decided to present this work within the context of contemporary art. SMT48’s criticality, historicity, and universality, I am convinced, exceed a mere digital asset and merit art‑historical evaluation.

NFT technology brought new possibilities: not speculative value, but the conceptual innovation of authenticity guarantees for digital works. To infinitely reproducible data, blockchain—distributed technology—attaches the paradoxical notion of an “original.” This may mark a significant turning point in art history.

At the same time, the speculative frenzy of the NFT market risked obscuring intrinsic value. Allowlists, utility, and roadmaps are effective for communities but can subordinate pure formal value.

With SMT48, while using the technical and conceptual potential of NFTs, I distanced the work from speculation and chose to compete purely on the strength of digital form. I did not graduate from an art university, have no ties with galleries, and possess no network in the art world. As a complete outsider, I took up this challenge.

This position offers a unique view. Unbound by academic training or industry conventions, I could naturally begin in the new NFT domain and choose the humble method of producing with only a smartphone thumb. As an ordinary Japanese person who did not set out for museums, I threw myself into the work as I was.

This candid sensibility of a life‑liver preceded academic theory. The path from outside the art world inward hints at a possible route in the post‑internet era.

Chapter 9: Art Without Museums—A Declaration of Digital Purism

SMT48’s true innovation lies in its mode of existence.

This work does not require a museum. More precisely, it is free from the conventional authority system of museums. No white walls, suitable lighting, climate control, or curatorial texts are necessary—because SMT48 requires only the most intimate exhibition space: your screen.

To “own” a work is not to possess a physical object; it is to obtain access rights in digital space. The work appears only in the instant signals travel as 0s and 1s between server and your device. SMT48 meets the viewer directly in the infinite space of the internet—without intermediaries, without ornaments—only as 1,024 pixels.

This circumvents the conventional authority systems of museums and galleries to create a new mode of circulation. This uncompromising digital purism proposes a new ontology for the 21st century: art that does not depend on matter, art that has no location, yet exists only “here”—in the moment these pixels emit light.

The 32×32 resolution is inseparable from this mode of existence. If resolution increases, it is no longer SMT48. If physically printed, pixel boundaries blur. Only when one pixel is shown as one pixel on a digital screen does the work take its true form.

You must go to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa. SMT48, in complete form, can be experienced wherever you are. This is not merely democratization but ubiquity. Simultaneously, it is a new scarcity—physically infinitely reproducible, yet authenticated digitally in a 21st‑century paradox.

What you see on this screen now is all of SMT48. Nothing else. Neither more nor less.

Chapter 10: An Approach to Universality

SMT48 is not closed within a particular culture, because it addresses a universal human practice.

Pixel art is a global visual language. The 8‑bit generation exists worldwide and shares this aesthetic. Sex, meanwhile, is the most universal human act. SMT48 sits at the intersection of these two universalities.

What’s more, only we humans, born as humans, can recognize this as SEX. Neither AI nor animals can understand it as sexual intercourse. This recognition itself is a privileged human capacity. To see two bodies intertwining and read love and desire there—this is a uniquely human faculty.

For overseas viewers, Japan’s “sexless” problem may seem particular to another country. But the loss of corporeality through digitization, the rift between virtual and real, and the disconnection from tradition confront the entire world, albeit to varying degrees. Japan is an experimental site where these issues surface most sharply. Cultural distance thus becomes a test of formal strength: even without Japanese context, the visual impact of 1,024 pixels appeals directly to viewers.

Japan‑specific elements such as shunga and the Forty‑Eight Techniques are actually entrances to universality. India’s Kama Sutra, China’s bedroom arts, and the West’s Ars amatoria—all cultures have systematized and artistically expressed sex. SMT48 is a 21st‑century expression of this shared human impulse.

I titled it in English not for exclusion but inclusion. “SAMURAI” is no longer only Japan’s; it has become a shared global icon. By linking this commons with sex as a shared human activity, I aimed for a work that crosses cultural boundaries.

Chapter 11: The Union of Laughter and the Sublime

Reactions split intriguingly into two poles: people who burst out laughing and people who felt a strange sublimity. Laughter is a sign of life. To laugh at sex is not to fear it. Shunga were called “laughing pictures”; this is a sign of healthy spirit. The ridiculousness of SMT48—acrobatic positions and minimal faces—is an intentionally designed device for laughter.

At the same time, the work contains deep sublimity. Reduced to 1,024 pixels, sex transcends specificity and becomes abstraction. It expresses not an individual act but a primal activity of life, the duality of existence, and the universal desire to unite with the other.

This coexistence of laughter and the sublime is the very marrow of Japanese culture—Noh and Kyōgen, earnestness and wit, sacred and profane. A “culture of duality” that contains opposites as opposites. SMT48 inherits this tradition in the present.

Chapter 12: The Democratization of Bodies

In SMT48, bodies are freed from every attribute. At 32×32 resolution, distinctions of beauty and ugliness, age, and body type are impossible. What remains is only the pure fact of “the body.” This is a quiet resistance to the stratification and idealization of bodies promoted by contemporary pornography and social media.

Faces in at most three pixels erase the individual and simultaneously include everyone. It is me, you, anyone and no one. This ultimate anonymity is also ultimate universality.

At the same time, the choices of warm traditional shunga skin tones, the name SAMURAI, and the system of the Forty‑Eight Techniques give these bodies a cultural position. The work is clearly born from a Japanese context, yet through extreme abstraction via pixels it is severed from specific individuals or bodily features.

This duality—cultural particularity and human universality—is not a contradiction. Shunga, too, depicted a human universal while employing a distinctly Japanese aesthetic. Samurai, while a Japanese symbol, has become global common property. SMT48’s bodies inherit this tradition in a 21st‑century form.

The forty‑eight positions are a democratic exploration of bodily possibility. They demand no particular physical ability and presuppose no ideal proportions. They visualize the potential latent in every body and simultaneously present a contemporary expression of Japan’s culture of kata.

Chapter 13: The Aesthetics of Contradiction

SMT48 does not resolve contradictions; it finds aesthetic value in presenting contradictions as contradictions:

• Traditional (shunga) yet innovative (pixel art)
• Japanese (Forty‑Eight Techniques) yet universal (a shared human practice)
• Erotic (intercourse) yet comical (faces in at most three pixels)
• Concrete (positions) yet abstract (reduced to 32×32)
• Analog (handwork) yet digital (pixels)
• Serious (cultural critique) yet unserious (humor)

These contradictions reflect the complex realities of today—multilayered and fluid, irreducible to simple binaries. SMT48 expresses this complexity as complex.

Chapter 14: A Legacy for the Future

What does SMT48 leave to the future? A cross‑section of sexual culture in Japan and the world in the early 2020s: a portrait of an era oscillating between sexlessness and porn excess, the real and the virtual, tradition and innovation.

It is also a proof of digital art’s potential—an example of a Japanese digital‑native work that, beyond the clamor of the NFT boom, competes by pure formal force and stands as contemporary art.

Above all, it is a seed of creativity. The forty‑eight kata exist as a completed system. How these kata will be interpreted, quoted, and transformed in the future is unknown. But once established as kata, they continue living beyond their time.

Four years after production, the work has matured. Born as NFTs, the works passed through the filter of time, clarifying their essential value. The trial‑and‑error of outlines, the rests for the eyes, countless revisions—memories from making, layered with four years of reflection, give the work stratified meanings. Unlike instantly consumed digital content, SMT48 found its position slowly. It stands opposite to images generated in an instant by AI—a record of human time.

Epilogue: 1,024 Questions—and a Question to Postwar Japan

SMT48 is a question composed of 1,024 pixels.

More precisely, it is a question composed of 1,024 pixels and this tens‑of‑thousands‑of‑characters statement.

Did the creative spirit toward sex that our ancestors possessed truly vanish? Or is it quietly breathing beneath faces in at most three pixels?

Bodies that intertwine fiercely and faces at their minimum—this contrast may be a self‑portrait of contemporary Japan: outwardly reserved while inwardly desiring intensely; socially quiet while unrestrained in virtual space.

Through the stage of the world we rediscover ourselves. This is not defeat but strategy. Shunga is praised at the British Museum, pixel art is recognized as contemporary art. This paradox becomes a new starting point for creation.

The forty‑eight bodies keep asking: why could Edo‑period Japanese laugh at, enjoy, and make art of sex, while we today find it difficult? Why, even after shunga exhibitions succeeded abroad, were they long difficult to hold in Japanese museums? Why do we re‑recognize our cultural heritage through foreign evaluation?

I completed the forty‑eight bodies on a small phone screen, with one thumb, repeatedly revising outlines. Exhausted, I napped; waking, I worked again. This persistence was like a ritual to reawaken a lost creative spirit.

When SMT48 is recognized worldwide, people will ask: “Why are we drawn to sex scenes with faces in at most three pixels?” I hope this question becomes a chance to remember a Japaneseness lost after the war—creative, playful, and capable of sublimating all human activities, sex included, into art.

Using the word “postwar” here is intentional—not merely a period label but a symbol of Japan’s long journey of confronting its cultural identity.

Faces in at most three pixels remain eternally succinct, watching everything. Bodies differ: they keep moving—overflowing, intertwining, seeking new shapes. This vitality of bodies may be our hope.

Forty‑eight techniques, faces in at most three pixels, 1,024 squares: may this combination of numbers become a gift from 21st‑century Japan to the world and, like a boomerang, return as a question to Japan itself.

SMT48 will make the world laugh, make it think, and ultimately become a mirror that reflects ourselves.

Appendix 1: Technical Details

Production Environment
Application: 8bit Painter (iOS)
Device: iPhone
Production period: Nov 2021 – Oct 2025
Artwork production: Nov 2021 – Jan 2022
Input method: direct tapping with thumb
Main steps: outline drawing, eye placement, mouth addition, fill‑in
Statement writing: Oct 2025

Color Design

The six base colors are: black outlines; traditional warm shunga skin tones (slightly darker warm tone for the male, slightly lighter warm tone for the female); red (mouth); cherry‑pink (female nipples); light blue (male sakayaki).

However, some traditional Forty‑Eight Techniques inevitably require props—goban (Go board), rope, and a position seated on a rock. To depict these, additional colors were used: dark brown (Go board) and ochre (rope).

The position seated on a rock—in other words, sex outdoors. Within a digital transparent background, a rock suddenly appears: nature rendered in pixels. This simple fact provokes a strange laughter. In selecting the forty‑eight positions, I simply wanted to include intercourse outdoors; adding gray (rock) serves only that purpose.

Appearance of Special Colors

In one body only, a special mixed color appears. In the position of sucking the nipple, the mouth region becomes an intermediate color between red and cherry‑pink. This is a technical necessity: at the instant mouth and nipple overlap, color too mingles. The 32×32 constraint unexpectedly produced sensuality.

About forty of the bodies use a transparent background and the six base colors. The remaining few include props and additional colors. Slight exceptions are more interesting than total uniformity.

The background is basically transparent. Yet fidelity to kata at times requires breaking purism.

Philosophy of Pixel Placement

Each pixel’s placement is determined by a single tap of the thumb. This directness and immediacy breathe life into the work. Corrections, retries, and trial‑and‑error—all are condensed into the movement of the thumb. No anti‑aliasing: pure pixels, pure outlines. This is a principled choice—a return to the essence of digital.

Appendix 2: An Archaeology of Responses

Responses in Japan
“Is this art?” → A question to art’s definition
“It’s like nostalgic Famicom” → Projection of nostalgia
“I can’t help laughing” → Return of the repressed
“Simple but deep” → Valuation of minimalism

Responses Abroad
“Brilliant minimalism” → Formalist evaluation
“The intersection of tradition and technology” → Interest in cultural hybridity
“Why only 3 pixels for faces? Genius!” → Surprise at constraint‑driven creativity
“This is what digital art should be” → An ideal of digital aesthetics

These differences are not mere cultural variance; they reveal differences in the collective unconscious toward sex, the body, and art.

Appendix 3: Possibilities for Development

SMT48 Animated
Minimal animation. A two‑frame eternal loop. Moving yet not—zombie‑like life.

SMT48 Kanji System
A system I developed randomly replaces pixels with selected kanji. Visual bodies transform into aggregates of characters. Kanji such as 「愛」 (love), 「欲」 (desire), 「肉」 (flesh), and 「霊」 (spirit) are placed according to position, generating new layers of meaning—an experiment crossing boundaries between digital and script, visual and linguistic, offering a new experience of reading the body.

SMT48 Physical
Nail clippers, embroidery, clothing. A new tactility born of digital × tradition × contemporary culture.

SMT48 VR
A three‑dimensional experience—immersion inside the pixels.

These possibilities do not damage the essence—the forty‑eight as kata. They instead prove the universality of the kata.

Appendix 4: The Artist’s Confession

In the winter of 2021, amid the NFT boom, I began for reasons I didn’t understand to make works that simultaneously depict SEX, SAMURAI, and shunga in pixels. I was intensely drawn to this combination and immersed myself in production without knowing why.

Samurai and shunga are Japanese elements; sexual depiction and the pixel technique are universal. I sensed intuitively that this combination could become a global language without falling into Orientalism.

I still remember the excitement of completing the first body. Within the extremely small 32×32 space, two bodies were unmistakably intertwined—the moment the impossible became possible.

Production was solitary. Late at night I faced the phone screen, placing pixels with my thumb—sometimes exhausted, sometimes excited, sometimes laughing. Those 800 hours were a pilgrimage for me.

The market’s reaction in NFTs was interesting. But four years on, what I truly sought became clear—art‑historical recognition. I want this to be remembered not as a mere digital asset but as a 21st‑century artwork.

Appendix 5: Responses to Criticism

“Isn’t this the commodification of sex?”
SMT48 is indeed sold as artwork. But that differs from commodifying sex itself. Faces in at most three pixels disable the identification and idealization on which the porn industry relies. This is an attempt to elevate sex from mere commodity to cultural subject. The work’s commodity aspect and the restoration of sex’s cultural value are not contradictory.

“Isn’t this cultural appropriation?”
As a Japanese person, I reinterpret Japanese culture for today. At the same time, the work aims to become a human heritage beyond Japan. Culture lives by being shared and transformed.

“It’s not serious art.”
Seriousness and humor do not oppose each other. The gravest themes require humor. Shunga’s tradition and the history of contemporary art attest to this.

Appendix 6: 2025 and Beyond

In 2025 I placed SMT48 within the context of contemporary art. This is a challenge to see whether a Japanese digital‑native work can stand as art as‑is, without conversion or translation.

Japan’s sexual culture stands at a crossroads. Annual births fell below 700,000 (2023) and marriages below 500,000. Meanwhile, virtual sexual content proliferates. This rift has moved beyond a social issue to a civilizational question.

I hope SMT48 becomes one answer: neither shaming sex nor consuming it, but presenting it as culture, as art—as proof of human creativity.

The forty‑eight bodies exist as a completed system. Kata are not fixed; they contain possibilities for interpretation and variation. Once established as kata, they live beyond time.

Faces in at most three pixels will gaze on forever without expression. In their line of sight I believe there are new sexual cultures, new representations of the body, new human possibilities.

Appendix 7: Positioning as Global Art

In this project, SMT48 is presented natively digital within smartphone screens. Not exhibiting in museums or galleries is not a compromise but the work’s true form. Made on a phone and viewed on a phone—this cycle suggests a new shape for 21st‑century art.

The museum’s white walls and gallery lighting are not essential. What is necessary are a digital screen and a gaze upon the work.

Anyone anywhere in the world can experience the work under the same conditions—New York collectors, Tokyo rappers, Nairobi artists, couples relaxing at home, students fiddling with phones during class—each in their own space facing the same forty‑eight bodies. This is the true democratization of art.

I aim to inscribe an expression of 1,024 pixels directly into art history—to compete not with physical scale or luxury of materials but with pure force of form and concept.

Appendix 8: Position within Japanese Art History

The Shunga Lineage
From Utamaro, Hokusai, and Kuniyoshi onward—the tradition of visualizing sex. But with a media leap from woodblock to pixels.

The Lineage of Abbreviation
Represented by Hokusai Manga, the tradition of expressing the maximum with minimal lines—an aesthetic that reduces complex reality to concise forms. SMT48’s 32×32 pixels are its extreme practice.

The Lineage of Chōjū‑giga
From the Heian national‑treasure handscrolls—a tradition of humor and stylization, symbolically expressing human activities and cohabiting sacred and profane. The method of defining shapes with black contour lines continues here.

The Lineage of Kawanabe Kyōsai
From the late Edo/Meiji “eccentric” painter who held together the serious and the comical, the sacred and the profane—his duality links directly to SMT48’s coexistence of laughter and the sublime.

The Rinpa Lineage
From Tawaraya Sōtatsu and Ogata Kōrin—a thoroughgoing flatness and the beauty of margin. A refusal of perspective, forms defined by black contours, composition with limited color fields. The bold margin of Wind and Thunder Gods screens, the repetition and disruption of the Irises screens. Rinpa’s spirit of intentionally breaking perfect symmetry contains both SMT48’s “overflowing bodies” and “condensed bodies.”

The Mono‑ha Lineage
From Lee Ufan and Suga Kishio—maximum effect via minimal intervention. Expression to the fullest with the minimal unit of 1,024 pixels.

The Superflat Lineage
Murakami Takashi’s boundary‑breaking between high art and subculture. As Superflat popularized through figures, SMT48, as a phone‑portable work accompanied by this statement, presents a new digital‑age intimacy.

SMT48 inherits these lineages while presenting a cutting‑edge new form of Japanese art adapted to the 21st‑century digital environment.

Appendix 9: Position within World Art History

The Lineage of Erotic Art
From ancient Greek red‑figure pottery, Pompeian frescoes, and the sculptures of Khajuraho in India to Japanese shunga—a universal tradition of art representing sex. SMT48 inherits this lineage in the digital age.

The Lineage of Minimalism
From Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism and Piet Mondrian’s grids to Donald Judd’s reduction—expressing the maximum with the minimum. SMT48’s 1,024 pixels are the ultimate minimalism of the digital age.

Dialogue with Pop Art
Warhol and Lichtenstein broke boundaries between mass culture and high art. SMT48 differs: not appropriated commercial images, but digital‑native creation—with affinity to Keith Haring’s iconic human figures.

Relation to Conceptual Art
Joseph Kosuth asked “What is art?” SMT48 asks “What is the body in the digital age?”—turning the constraint (32×32) into concept.

Distance from Neo‑Expressionism
Opposite to the materiality of Baselitz or Kiefer. SMT48 leaves no physical trace—purely digital expression.

Distance from Street Art
Banksy, Basquiat, Haring—art outside museums. But street art depends on physical locations (walls, streets) and must be seen in situ. SMT48 is freed from place and realizes true decentralization—accessible anywhere, simultaneously.

A Pioneer of Digital/Post‑Internet Art
Following digital‑native expressions by Rafaël Rozendaal and Petra Cortright, SMT48 offers an independent proposal from Asia rather than a Western‑centric one.

As First‑Generation NFT Art
A different aesthetic from CryptoPunks and Bored Apes: not community or utility but pure formal force. Unlike Beeple’s daily practice, SMT48 takes an East‑Asian approach of completed kata.

SMT48’s uniqueness lies in presenting a value system different from Western art history—Japan’s culture of kata and the aesthetics of duality—while understanding that history. Using a global visual language (pixels) to express a local sensibility (shunga, samurai), this duality points to a truly global art for the 21st century.

Appendix 10: Reflections on Love

Ultimately, SMT48 is a work about love. The forty‑eight positions are forty‑eight forms of love—fierce, gentle, acrobatic, still. What they share is the will of two bodies to become one.

Faces in at most three pixels express love’s unknowability. We cannot read the other’s true feelings; we cannot read expressions. Yet the bodies are there, touching. This coexistence of certainty and uncertainty may be love’s essence.

Modern digitized love—matching apps, video calls, virtual dates—seems to strip love of corporeality. SMT48 attempts to restore corporeality within the digital—imprinting the weight and warmth of the body into each pixel placement.

Appendix 11: Censorship and Freedom

Sexual expression in Japan has always battled censorship—mosaic regulations since Meiji, obscenity crackdowns after the war. It took over 150 years for shunga to be recognized as “art.”

SMT48 solves censorship technically. At 32×32 pixels it is impossible to depict genitals. This is not self‑censorship but unavoidable abstraction arising from the medium’s properties.

This abstraction liberates imagination: the freedom to imagine what is unseen, to interpret, to project. Faces in at most three pixels and bodies in 32×32 become devices that generate infinite stories.

The goal is not to circumvent censorship but to render it meaningless. That is SMT48’s strategy.

Appendix 12: A Letter to Collectors

What does it mean to own SMT48?

Those who own SMT48 as NFTs are the work’s first understanders and co‑creators. The proof of ownership stamped in your wallet is not a speculative asset; it is a testament of belief in new forms of digital art.

NFT owners guarantee the work’s “originality.” To infinitely reproducible digital images, they grant paradoxical uniqueness. This is a distributed authentication through blockchain, differing from museum certificates or gallery appraisals.

Importantly, NFT ownership does not restrict access. Everyone can see the same 1,024 pixels. But owners enjoy a special relationship within universal access. It resembles how temple sculptures and paintings are open to all while donors hold a special spiritual link.

Digital purism does not conflict with NFT ownership. Precisely because no physical object is required, ownership becomes purely conceptual and spiritual. What you own is not matter but relationship—with the work, with the artist, and with the universal human practice embodied by the forty‑eight bodies.

NFT holders are new patrons of the 21st century. Without museum or gallery intermediation, they directly support the work and make its existence possible. This direct support embodies the democratization of art in the digital age.

Appendix 13: The Technique of Silence

SMT48 is a quiet work. No sound, no motion; 1,024 pixels stand still. This silence resists a media environment that constantly moves, makes noise, and demands attention.

Silence demands observation—lingering gaze, discovery of detail, activation of imagination. This slow looking is rare today.

Viewing the forty‑eight positions in sequence becomes a meditative experience—the subtle differences between positions, the ingenuity of pixel placement, the discovery of form. Even swiping to the next piece is a new ritual of the digital age.

In silence, the work speaks eloquently: an apparatus for hearing the essential amid a noisy world.

Final Declaration: Forty‑Eight Possibilities

SMT48 is a universe composed of 1,024 pixels. Each pixel is a minimal unit of possibility. Combined, they shape forty‑eight bodies and generate infinite interpretations—a new mandala for the digital age.

I ask:

• With how many pixels can love be expressed?
• How far can the body be abstracted?
• How can tradition connect to the future?
• What can Japan offer the world?
• Can humans remain human within the digital?

SMT48 presents forty‑eight answers; the true answers are within you.

The forty‑eight bodies will intertwine forever. Faces in at most three pixels will remain forever silent. In that eternity, find the fleeting brilliance of life. That is SMT48’s ultimate aim.

With only a thumb, on a small phone screen, I sought to express humanity’s oldest practice in the newest format. I hope this contradiction‑laden attempt will be inscribed in humanity’s memory as 21st‑century art.

SAMURAI TECHNIQUES (SMT48)

2021–2025
Digital‑Native Art
32×32 pixels
48 works
Created with thumbs on iPhone
For the future of love

October 2025
Tokyo

This statement is one reading of SMT48. The forty‑eight bodies and faces in at most three pixels contain 48×∞ stories. I hope each person discovers their own.

Prepared: 2025‑10‑04 03:00

All text, images, and metadata on this page are owned by “SAMURAI TECHNIQUES” (anonymous). Unauthorized use prohibited (reproduction, reprinting, adaptation, redistribution, public transmission, scraping, dataset creation, ML/AI training/evaluation/fine‑tuning/inference). Remedies may include injunctions, takedown requests, and damages. Quotation permitted only within the law with clear source links and minimal extent. Governing law: Japan / Agreed jurisdiction: Tokyo District Court.

All contents are owned by [SAMURAI TECHNIQUES] (anonymous). Unauthorized use prohibited (reproduction, adaptation, redistribution, public transmission, scraping, dataset creation, ML/AI training/evaluation/fine‑tuning/inference). Remedies may include takedown, injunction, and damages. Quotation only within the law with clear attribution and minimal extent. Governing law: Japan / Jurisdiction: [Tokyo District Court].

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