Black Gay Artist Alexander Kargaltsev Sits on “White Man Chair” In Response to Dasha Zhukova’s “Black Woman Chair” Debacle (NSFW).

It was only a matter of time before this happened, eh?
Black Gay Russian artist Alexander Kargaltsev recently issued a rebuttal to Dasha Zhukova’s controversial ‘Black Woman Chair’ photograph: an image of him, naked, sitting on a nude ‘white man’ chair. He told the Huffington Post, “I was forced to leave Russia because of the discrimination I experienced as a gay [man]. I’m disappointed that the tradition of xenophobia is so strong in my home country that such an image of Ms. Zhukova can appear as if it is normal and unremarkable. Russian people do not seem to realize when people offend the principle of color, nationality, sexual orientation and so on.”
See the NSFW image below:

 
He went on to tell Out There Magazine, “[I]t deeply saddens me to see that racism is now being glamorized and thus made not only acceptable but trendy by the likes of Ms. Zhukova. My own composition reverses the visual injustice and offense perpetrated by that editorial and in a way restores the equality of genders, races, and sexual orientations. Sadly, I understand very well that my work will be seen by most Russians as provocative and inappropriate, while that repulsive image (published on Martin Luther King’s Day of all days in a year) will hardly make anyone over there shake their head.”

 
The original offending image

Though undoubtedly provocative, Kargaltsev’s image differs from Zhukova’s in very salient ways: the man in the picture is a real breathing human being, who voluntarily agreed to pose for the photograph. And both men are naked, leveling the playing field. Very different from Zhukova posing on a sculpture made to look like a bound black woman…with Zhukova clothed, and the other barely covered.
At any rate, thoughts on Kargaltsev’s ‘answer’ to Zhukova’s original photograph?
See more on Huffington Post.