Kinbaku in Asia-Pacific

Outside Japan, the Asia-Pacific region met kinbaku by several routes at once: through Japanese teachers on tour, through people who had lived in Tokyo, through the English-speaking scenes of Europe and North America, and through local artists who found rope on their own. The early tours of Japanese teachers to Hong Kong and Australia are covered in Kinbaku goes global. This essay looks at how scenes in Taiwan, mainland China and Hong Kong, Singapore, Southeast and South Asia, and Australia grew, and at an argument that comes up in several of them about whether rope should be presented as art or as sex.

Taiwan: a rope show as a coming-out

The best-documented beginning is in Taiwan. In a 2019 article in 婦研縱橫, a gender studies journal published at National Taiwan University, the performers and organizers 漉露 and Shin Nawakiri describe what they call the first public rope performance in Taiwan. In April 2005 the Taiwanese BDSM support group 皮繩愉虐邦 invited the Japanese rope master Kannagi for three days and five shows titled 夜色繩艷. Nawakiri had lived in Tokyo for more than a year and often visited the SM bar Kannagi ran there; watching one of Kannagi’s shows, he thought that nobody in Taiwan had ever seen anything like it.

The authors present the show as activism. The group had been founded only in mid-2004 with an advocacy aim, and it sold tickets online, sent out press releases and held a press conference, so that the event spoke to the public and not only to insiders. It co-produced the show with 臨界點劇象錄, a theater company founded in 1988 that had long worked on gender, gay and AIDS themes, which gave the young organizers a venue, a way to apply for funding and a frame for media coverage, although group members did almost all the technical work and took turns modeling. They refused to strip the sexual side out of the story: asked by a newspaper whether it was sex or art, Kannagi said it was art but could not escape sexual associations.

Growth was fast. In 2005, the authors write, the group managed about one gathering a season and each was a major event; by 2018 several organizers were running events every weekend. Dedicated rope salons followed. Cats Downstairs opened in Taipei in 2018, moved within the city in 2021 and opened a new studio in 2024 that it shares with The Suspended Canvas, a group co-founded by the rigger Noir Fix; it runs open salons, a women’s salon, classes and shows. The Taipei rope artist Soa has planned or performed in more than a hundred rope shows since 2016 and has advised theater and television productions on rope. Kinbaku World’s Taipei directory lists current spaces.

The same authors are critical of where the scene went next. In the late 2010s, they argue, Taiwan’s BDSM world grew larger and easier to join but also more cautious, presenting itself as healthy and separate from pornography and turning conservative on gender and age politics, a mainstreaming they compare to trends in the United States twenty to thirty years earlier. In a 2020 university talk, Nawakiri carried the critique further, arguing that an Orientalist view of Japanese rope has been reinforced and exploited in both East and West.

Hong Kong and mainland China

The Taiwanese authors contrast their island with its neighbors. Hong Kong’s scene, they write, had the advantage of easy contact with English-language BDSM, yet its practitioners leaned toward respectability, and local news stories presented rope as art and meditation, something that need not be erotic at all. A Hong Kong-based practitioner interviewed by Iris Carmina Ordean and Heath Pennington for a 2019 article described exploring rope through dance to show emotions other than desire.

In mainland China, according to the 2019 article, there were almost no public BDSM events before 2017, after which activity grew quickly even as the state pressed harder on feminist and sexual-minority groups. Slate’s 2019 report on Shanghai gives the detail. Before 2017 most local practitioners taught themselves from online videos and met in private flats. In August 2017 an Italian organizer who had trained in Japan launched what Slate calls the city’s first regular public rope workshop, held at a lesbian bar and promoted on WeChat; about forty people came to the first night, roughly half foreign and half Chinese, and nearly two hundred attended an anniversary event a year later. Police later investigated the group, its WeChat group was blocked and the workshops paused until April 2019. In Tianjin, Slate reports, a rope group operates as a registered business with police permits.

Under that pressure, rope was often renamed. Slate reports that organizers advertised it as “rope art” rather than bondage in Chinese posts, and the Taiwanese authors reproduce a 2018 notice from a mainland rope gathering that called itself a “green and healthy” offline 繩藝 (rope-art) exchange, ruled out “shame play” and prohibited discussion of BDSM topics unrelated to rope art. The term 繩藝, they note, frames rope as a pure art and craft.

Singapore and Southeast Asia

Singapore’s scene was studied early. Zoey Jones cites a 2008 master’s thesis by C. S. Sheela that found the BDSM body in Singapore to be marked by gender, class and race, with Chinese men placed at the bottom of the local hierarchy around rope, and that the exotic and artistic trappings of shibari helped participants reconcile personal conservatism with their attraction to a stigmatized practice.

Singapore also produced one of the region’s best-traveled rope works. Bunny, by the Singapore-based artist Daniel Kok and the Australian Luke George, is staged in the round under a web of colored ropes and asks what would happen if everyone in the theater were the “bunny”, the person being tied. Storm Media reports that the two met in a rope course, rehearsed the piece in 2015 and premiered it in Singapore in 2016, and that it had been staged in Shanghai before it reached the Taipei Arts Festival in 2019. According to Arts House, it was co-produced by The Substation in Singapore and played Melbourne’s Asia TOPA festival in February 2017. Kok told Storm Media that the heart of a rope performance is the process of tying, as a tea ceremony is about making the tea, and that the Singapore government had no problem with the work.

In Bangkok, Yada Kinbaku began teaching shibari in 2018 and has run workshops under the Kotori name since 2019, and she describes her performance and visual art as using rope to examine power, sexuality, censorship and women’s autonomy in Southeast Asia. See the Bangkok directory.

India

India’s documented scene is recent. In 2025 The Nod described Amiya Bhanushali, a Mumbai artist who took up shibari in the early 2020s, learning from online resources and the local kink community, and who runs Silly Hands Shibari, which the magazine calls probably the only professional studio of its kind in India. She has also taught workshops in Gurgaon, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, tells students that sessions are not about sexual release, and wants the practice to include queer, fat, disabled and neurodivergent people.

Australia

In Australia, one well-documented career shows close links between the local kink community and North American conventions. The Sydney rigger Mark De Viate, who trained with Osada Steve in the Akechi Denki tradition, co-founded the kink house DV8House in 2001, performed at Sydney’s Hellfire Club from 2006 to 2019, presented at an Austin rope symposium by 2005 and became a regular educator at ShibariCon in Chicago, and in 2015 co-founded Studio Kink, a kink education and community center. He also provided the shibari for Opera Australia’s 2019 Madama Butterfly, according to the studio. Teachers traveled the other way too: Lee Harrington recalled in 2013 that he had missed the 2007 ShibariCon because he was touring Australia.

Sydney had a dedicated rope school and festival by the early 2010s. A 2014 article in Archer Magazine describes the Sydney Rope Dojo, where classes covered rope handling, safety and injury prevention, and announces the Sydney Rope Festival of 4 to 6 October that year, with workshops, talks and performances for all levels. The Berlin teacher Gestalta lists appearances at Sydney festivals in 2013 and 2014. Elsewhere, community groups took a deliberately non-sexual line: Peer Rope Adelaide, run in 2020 by seven volunteers and funded mainly by a small annual membership fee, taught more than a hundred members three nights a week in a studio with sixteen suspension points, and its director stressed that its classes are never sexual. Kinbaku World’s Sydney and Melbourne directories list current studios.

Art, sex and an open argument

In several of these scenes a similar tension appears. Shanghai organizers advertise “rope art” to stay out of trouble, an Adelaide collective promises classes that are never sexual, and Kok compares tying to a tea ceremony. The Taiwanese authors who staged their country’s first public rope show see a cost in this: every time a practice is defended as “not porn” or “actually healthy”, they argue, it repeats the division between good and bad sex that kept sexual minorities marginal to begin with. Whether rope in Asia-Pacific is presented as art, therapy or desire, that question is now part of its history.