No Sex For The Dead at Singapore’s Body Worlds’ Show

Earlier this year, the Cycle of Life Exhibit, which features cadavers in life- like and sometimes-uncompromising positions opened, and received much criticism in Berlin. The controversial exhibit charts life from conception to old age and features real cadavers that were donated by people who agreed to have their bodies used posthumously for educational purposes.

First presented in Tokyo in 1995, Body Worlds exhibitions have been hosted by more than 50 museums in North America, Europe, and Asia  and have been visited by some 28 million people around the world.

The exhibit is truly unique and has been severely criticized by many as it features copulating cadavers. German politicians particularly took offense at the presentation.

When the Cycle of Life traveled to conservative Singapore where nearly 200 human specimens will remain on display at the Singapore Science Center until next March, the exhibit was dramatically altered. What one views is a flat cross-section of two copulating bodies that only reveals their internal organs.

“Sensational display of sexual activity does not go with our theme. It is for educational and science study, and there is not much controversy for using real human body specimens in this exhibition for us,” says Chew Tuan Chiong, the Science Center’s chief executive.

The founders of Body Worlds, anatomist, Gunther von Hagens and his wife Angelina Whalley, use their own unique process to prepare the bodies, which he developed in the late 1970s at the University of Heidelberg. He calls his process, plastination, and it involves replacing body fluids and soluble fats with special plastics made of resin or with silicone rubber. This method allows for the corpse to be preserved in such a way that muscles, tendons and nerves are visibly exposed.

Previous Body Worlds exhibits have depicted the preserved bodies doing everything from playing cards to riding corpse horses, but until Berlin, it had not featured corpses actually having sex.

“Death and sex are both taboo topics. I’m bringing them together. Death belongs to life… Without sex no life would exist,” said von Hagens in a recent interview.

Sex coupled with death is often considered necrophilia, and if not illegal, it is certainly enough to make a normal person want to lose his or her lunch. There is apparently no law forbidding the depiction of a corpse having sex in Germany (whether or not he or she was of the age of consent before death).

Good taste seems to be the battle cry here, even for the horniest of those who once walked among the living. Art imitating life is one thing, but art imitating the dead, well, that well may be a corpse of another very tasteless color.