Sou Noaki Reframes Adult Star Riko Hoshino in “a kind lie”

Sou Noaki photographs beauty on his own terms. He grew up in a rural town with a clear view of Mount Fuji, the kind of place that usually ends up romanticized. But that’s not what stayed with him. “My town isn’t all beautiful,” he says. “If you go towards the sea, you’ll find dilapidated houses and piles of garbage.” That’s the version he holds onto, the quieter one, the one people tend to ignore.

That instinct carries straight into his work. In “a kind lie”, an exclusive series for CVLTARTES, shot inside a love hotel in Kabukicho, Tokyo’s most infamous entertainment district, intimacy feels slightly off from the start. The setting already comes loaded, but Noaki strips things down just enough for something else to surface. There’s no rush to explain anything; the images take their time.

The subject, Riko Hoshino, is a famous Japanese adult star known for a carefully constructed image of softness and feminine charm. Here, that image starts to slip.

“I wanted to express the rawness and true self that she inherently possesses. I thought there was a sexier and more beautiful side to her than what you see in her adult videos,” Noaki says.

You can feel that shift almost immediately. The images don’t try to smooth anything out. They hold onto that tension, on purpose. There’s a kind of closeness that feels real, but not necessarily comfortable, like you’re seeing something you’re not fully meant to.

“The woman in the photograph looked like a completely different person. Her raw appearance and dramatic transformation felt like a form of expression in itself. I was stunned. When I realized that she might be telling a kind of lie born from kindness, I felt an even deeper depth and strength in her womanhood,” he adds.

Hoshino moves through the space in a way that feels slightly unfamiliar. Not a transformation in the obvious sense, more like a weight shift. In how she looks back, how she holds herself, how much she gives away, and how much she keeps.

There’s also something about the setting that never really lets you forget where you are. The room feels staged, but at the same time, too real and too used. It carries other stories you don’t get to see. That tension sits quietly in the background of every frame.

Visually, the series stays tight, dim light, closed rooms, no way out of the frame. The hotel stops being just a location and starts acting like a container. Everything happens inside it, and nothing really escapes.

Noaki’s references move between extremes without much hesitation. “I draw inspiration from a variety of sources. Sometimes it’s from casual photos posted on social media, sometimes from amazing works of art by masters, and sometimes even from porn videos.” It all sits on the same level here.

You don’t really leave these images with answers. If anything, they stay with you more quietly, in small details, in the way she looks back, or doesn’t. “a kind lie” feels less like something you fully grasp and more like something you catch fragments of.