Shunga have never been easy for westerners. Now they are even more difficult to see, accustomed as we are to a turgid, universally performative pornography, to seeing smears of putrifying sexuality wherever we turn our eyes. A quotidian sensuality, free of these "contractual"obligations, played out through "the lineaments of gratified desire" is almost beyond imagining. In any case, extraordinary elegance of line and pattern, balanced with breathtaking anatomical and psychological realism, such as is offered by Shunga, never went down well in the west. It’s the gratification we find hard to take, not the sex.

When it became possible to show Shunga, most commentators, perversely, praised their unique formal qualities as an extension to the European figurative tradition, from the Discobolus to Degas, and passed over their subject in silence. Others suggested that Shunga were, essentially, elaborate sex manuals, luxurious wedding presents for the bride. There is some truth in this, several works in this exhibition show abandoned books face down as if the woman had just stopped reading. But not much, the mythic and literary conceits, the broad humour the in-jokes, everyday locations and the intense psychological presence of the participants in many Shunga indicate their origins in a complex multi-layered culture in which sex was never a shameful exception. There were no Shunga specialists From the earliest days, Uki-o-e artists made Shunga as part of their normal output, their creative coverage of life in the Floating World..

Shunga are best looked at as pictures of and for people enjoying themselves, or at least trying to, and intended to be enjoyed in their own right. They began life as painted albums, in the hot house artistic atmosphere of seventeenth century pleasure quarters, notably the theatres and the New Yoshiwara, the brothel district of Edo created in 1657 and quickly appeared as albums of woodblock prints, as Uki-o-e became their dominant form. The surprise of this exhibition is a delightful, anonymous nineteenth century album of 12 small scale images, typical of the Shunga tradition. They range from an encounter between a samurai in full armour with an elaborately dressed Geisha to an almost naked moment, on which two heads, two gazes are fused, together contemplating the enthralling moment of penetration.If this is voyeurism we share it with the participants. Their pose is formed by the psychological requirements of the moment but the bodies are drawn with an eye to the physical truth of the embrace, the man’s knees firmly planted, one behind the other.the woman’s leg crooked over his forearm. Psychology and anatomy are linked by design and patterning, at once part of the inner logic of intention and desire and an intensely decorative means to display it.

The reverse of each image in the album shows a scene of every day life in close up against a stylised distant landscape – for instance a plate with food and chopsticks, books and writing implements and a set of drawers one half open, into which a rat makes its own grand entrance. In another print series by ?? the constant presence of the everyday I shown by a set of inserts of crowds at famous Edo tourist sites Elsewhere poems and cartouches link sex continually to other pleasures.

No doubt Shunga prompted ideas on the spur of the moment, so to speak, but their visual splendours may be enjoyed calmly. The images in this album are variations on the action, naked and clothed with no particular sequence. Thankfully, Japanese culture was never infected with the ancient European concern for the naked body as the cynosure of truth and beauty, so clothing was always part of the embodied elegance of action and longing. Albums invoke this sense of continual variation perfectly. Psychoanalysis has long toyed with the idea that there is a "blind spot" in the way we look, prompted by the null point of desire. A great delight of Shunga is the use of great waves of gorgeously patterned and decorated clothing around the bodies to promote a deliciously sensual, extended game of blind’s man’s buff in which the object of desire always slips beyond grasp into the blind spot.This game for the eyes is the opposite of European striptease with its tawdry progression, its promise that all will soon be revealed.

A print by Hokusai’s pupil, Shigenobu (1787-1832), made around 1810 uses the blind spot of desire in an brilliant account of sexual curiousity The woman has playfully seized the end of the penis whilst its shaft is concealed by her thigh thus making a visual mystery of the erection. It’s also a mystery to her anxious partner who gazes between their thighs with his fingers to his lips. The relatively simple swirls of their robes, echo and amplify a sense of surprise, of an absence filled to unexpected excess.

To enjoy looking at Shunga one should remember that the artist always plays a game on many levels simultaneously whatever his style. The image may be graceful, severely elegant, like the Shuncho in this show but this is never mere style, never a decorative container. In this case both fully dressed partners hold their hands to their mouths repress their cries while studiously ignoring their exposed genitals. The image may also be comic In a print from an anonymous series in the Rimpa (?) style a set of female genitals hovers in the upper left hand corner, a small male figure in the lower right contemplates them as if they were the moon or Mt Fuji. Whatever the scene, to look at Shunga, is to be reminded that, despite everything around us, we can still see sex as part of a fulfilled sensual life. .

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