collection | general collection | H | HANDA kazuo

HANDA kazuo

[1952, Japon — 2016, Onomichi, Préfecture D'hiroshima, Japon]

An employee at a shipyard in Onomichi, Japan, Kazuo Handa devoted all his free time to a single obsession: smoking. To satisfy this passion, he set up an extraordinary system—a true ceremony—in which, year after year, he made his own pipes, cigarette holders, ashtrays, and pipe stands from pages of erotic magazines cut into strips and glued together. More than eight hundred items exist. He died at age sixty-four of mouth cancer, leaving behind the enigma of what led him to associate the pleasures of his tobacco addiction with erotic images—perhaps a ritual for achieving extreme sexual pleasure.