The limbic system is the area of your brain that is connected to memory and emotions. The artist named himself this due to the memories and emotions felt during acts of lust and love. His work is a collection of graphic drawings that highlight and educate about sex.
Limbic System
We asked Limbic System a few questions about his work...
What is your background in art and what was your work like before you decided on your style and founded your brand Limbic System?
I studied in the Department of Art and Creative Industries. My graduation thesis touched on gender issues and I also combined it with fashion design. Now I am more focused on graphic painting.
Your work is very erotic – what is it about sexual organs and sexual acts that motivates you to draw this?
We feel that bodies, lust and sex are indispensable things in life but people like to avoid talking and looking at them. Our generation seems to be very open, but it is still difficult to get rid of the norm and limitations of our education which still sees discussing sex as taboo. We feel that it is necessary to talk about these things so we express sex in a creative way wanting to respect all kinds of genders, sexual orientations, sexual temperaments and different physical appearances.
How did you feel when you posted your first piece of erotic art on social media? What were your first responses like from your family, friends and the general Instagram community? Do you ever get nervous about your art violating Instagram’s guidelines?
When we posted my very first picture, it was a little stressful, because the fan pages of other graphic texts and illustrations in Taiwan seem to be presented in comics, there were fewer people posting online platforms. We don’t know if everyone’s response is good or not. At that time, we used a lot of hashtags to make our posts more visible. Later, we gradually got fans, and they also gave us a lot of praise. This helped me begin to feel happy to understand and love my work.
At first, we didn’t tell a lot of our friends and family that we had created a fan page. We wanted to operate silently, but sometimes we spoke to a few friends when we needed different opinions. Maybe because knowing we have done similar subjects in school before and have always been paying attention to gender issues, my relatives and friends usually do not seem so surprised after they’ve become aware of my fan page.
We are often reported to Instagram for our illustrations – Actually our account was blocked again yesterday. In fact, at first we didn't realize that we had a special challenge with putting our work online as we know that many artists post naked and nude images, but then we took a hard look and found that most of the authors deal with drawing genitals in a different way, that makes it slightly disguised. Since our works are always very straight forward no matter in the method of texts or graphics, we’re not thinking of changing anything now.
In the future, we maybe should abandon using Instagram and switch to another platform. But with many people using Instagram in Taiwan it is the easiest and more practical social media platform to use so it is a problem at present!
You often sell your work at markets, how do the general public passing by react to your work? Do you have any memorable stories?
Many people look at our work from afar, often it is not a bad public reaction, many of them look at the novelty with interesting eyes. There are also many people who have followed our instagram.
Often families are the biggest clientele at markets, so people often quickly skip past us with their children. Though one time a child stopped to point and question our work in which their mother replied very honest and seriously to educate them – this gave us a warm impressed feeling.
In addition, with some of our products some manufacturers have detailed that they could not cooperate with printing our designs because they deem it to be restricted content.
What do you think makes good erotic art?
In terms of images, I think look at the technique of the artist based on lines believing that it requires careful consideration. How they have observed the contours of the human body and how they have illustrated the charm of the act and object.
The content of the story that you want to express is sometimes inspired from friends or your own life experience, capturing the appearance of the fragments of life and the subtle emotions in the event is very important to me. It means that by incorporating emotions, if the viewer has a similar experience, he can resonate with it and feel a connection to the art work. While telling the story, it also allows the viewer to project his own emotions and stories.