PHOTOGRAPHY REVIEW : Hosoe’s Disturbing Beauty : Art: A 30-year retrospective of the Japanese master demonstrates the fine line he walks between acceptability and alienation.

For painfully exquisite, classically sensual photography, the Western world has the work of the late Robert Mapplethorpe. And Japan has Eikoh Hosoe.

The 59-year-old, Tokyo-based artist is a master at turning the human form into near-abstract sculptural subjects. Like Mapplethorpe, Hosoe is rarely interested in examining his subjects’ character. Instead, the people in his photographs are subject to artistic whim--whether they are nude or fully costumed, they become either objects or players in his mystical pageants.

Works by Hosoe, who is well known in his own country, have been seen primarily in commercial gallery shows in the United States, with a few exceptions. Now, more than 100 photographs by Hosoe are included in the touring, 30-year retrospective “Eikoh Hosoe: Meta” currently at San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts. Nine series of works are included in this extremely beautiful and deeply disturbing exhibition, and, throughout, Hosoe’s work is neither easy to like nor simple to dismiss.

Hosoe walks a fine line between the acceptable and the not-so-acceptable; none of his work is pornographic--this is clearly all Art-with-a-capital-A. But in both his pictures of the naked human body--as in a series titled “Embrace”--and in his narrative works--as in a series called “Kamaitachi” done in the countryside where as a child Hosoe lived during World War II--an air of alienation haunts the images. This may be due partially to the fact that Hosoe’s influences come both from photographers like Edward Weston, whose studies of the nude are equally formal and inhuman, as well as from the rigid world of classical dance--both Eastern and Western. But Hosoe’s work also is more complex than any one of his influences, and, collected here, it has the exhaustive feel of a grueling psychological self-examination.

Hosoe’s first works were done in the early 1950s, when the artist was still a high school student. His seminal, prize-winning portrait, which set him on his professional course, was a wonderfully personal image of an American child who lived in a U.S. Army camp in Tokyo. This intimate and sensitive work, titled “Poddie Chan, Grant Heights,” may not have set the tone for Hosoe’s later existentialism, but its examination of the other appears, in retrospect, to be at least a signal of things to come.

Hosoe’s subsequent subjects, however, quickly became more purely Japanese and, at the same time, more stylized.

For example, one picture from 1960 from the series titled “Man and Woman” shows a woman’s face framed in the grasp of a man’s arm, her clearly discomfited expression lodged into his armpit. It is at once an abusive posture and a crystallized commentary on male domination of females. Hosoe, however, gives no hint as to how we should interpret his meaning.

Hosoe’s friend and sometime-inspiration for much of the work here was the late Tatsumi Hijikata, the originator of the avant-garde Japanese dance/theater known as Butoh. Like Hijikata, Hosoe’s art explores the emotional aftermath of the war in Japan, and it combines Eastern forms of stylization with the malaise of existentialism. However, Hosoe has taken the partnering of dance and stopped it in a single pose. The effect is very powerful, the message often scary.

The spookiness is particularly clear in a series about an androgynous-looking male character named “Simmon,” always shown dressed in a kimono, wearing women’s makeup, and often baring his breast to reveal his maleness. Hosoe planted Simmon in a variety of settings--urban and rural--and Simmon always looks out of place: He is a jarring, mocking misfit plunked into contemporary life. Perhaps it is his formal dress, or maybe the seductive, suggestive expressions on his face, or maybe just the play between his staginess and the clean well-defined scenes that make him an aberration, a clash between some trace of old Japan and the modern world.

Some of the most surreal pictures in this exhibition are contained in a group called “Barakei,” also known as “Ordeal By Roses,” a series of images done in the early 1960s using writer Yukio Mishima as a subject. In a statement about these works, Hosoe calls them images of “life and death”--but it would seem that they are more about death than life. In one, Mishima is shown laid out on a patio, wrapped in a garden hose, as if strangled and forever bound by a snake. In another he is shown lying down, looking expired, with a rose laid across his chest. Memories of the British Pre-Raphaelites’ and French Symbolists’ paintings inform these works, but the images are also the artist’s projections onto a subject who was also his friend. Mishima committed suicide in 1970, just as he and Hosoe were completing a second-edition publication based on these pictures.

Throughout Hosoe’s nine very different series, each of them done over prolonged periods of time, Hosoe turns often to the dark, ominous underbelly of life. When he keeps things bright, the works seem trivial, as in a group of fashion pictures called “Kimono,” but at its best, his work is teasingly seductive for the same reason that it ultimately is disorienting: He lights up the darkness, but offers no redemption.

Hosoe’s work depicts a world gone awry, a world of pairings and postures that have great power, but no will to survive.

Ultimately, it is a very depressing world, one well worth seeing, but you wouldn’t want to stick around it for very long.

* “Eikoh Hosoe: Meta” continues at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego’s Balboa Park through Oct. 11. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, admission is $3. Call 239-5262.