Mix & Match · Collectible Shunga Ehon
Limited Edition · 1,600 Unique Combinations
"Two volumes. One sliding shōji case. Every opening — a unique image never seen before."
About the Book
Love is a collectible fine art object — a shunga-inspired ehon in two watoji-bound volumes. Each volume holds 40 pages of hand-drawn erotic illustration. Open them together and the kasane mechanic comes alive.
Kasane (重ね, "layering") is a Japanese bookbinding tradition where the cut edges of two volumes align to create a new, composite image across the seam. In Love, this yields 1,600 unique cross-seam combinations — each one unrepeatable, each one a work of art.
Handcrafted with 160g washi-like uncoated paper, wood kakemono hardware, and a sliding shōji wooden case. Landscape format, 260 × 340 mm. Limited edition.
The Mechanic
The core mechanic. Each volume holds 40 pages of unique graphic patterns. Place the two volumes side by side and the right-hand page of the left book meets the left-hand page of the right book at the seam — generating 1,600 unique cross-seam image combinations from 40 × 40 page pairings.
A foundational Japanese aesthetic concept: one thing seen as another. Mitate bridges high culture — classical literature, myth, legend — with the contemporary and the erotic, the elevated with the intimate. In shunga tradition this is the intellectual game that gives the image its second life: the viewer recognises the allusion and holds both readings at once. Every page in Love works as a complete composition on its own — and again, differently, as one half of its 1,600 possible pairs.
The stolen glance through a shōji screen — the forbidden view through a gap in the wall — nozoki (覗き, peeping) is a motif in Japanese erotic art since the Edo period. The case of Love is built on this tradition. The sliding shōji panel is not packaging: it is a threshold. Opening it is a deliberate, intimate act — a pause before looking, a frame around the moment of discovery. What lies inside is revealed only to those who choose to look.
The Illustrations
Every spread works as a complete composition on its own. Hover to see its mitate pair — the same subject seen through another volume, another context, another moment.
In Motion
Mix & Match
Flip each volume independently — create your own combination
←→ left volume · AD right volume
The Artist
Originally from Ukraine and now based in Israel, Sveta Dorosheva is an illustrator whose work lives at the boundary of myth, fairy tale, and the quietly extraordinary. Over fifteen years of practice she has built a language rooted in Eastern European folk tradition and medieval manuscript art — dense with ornament, alive with story, impossible to take in all at once.
Her projects cross disciplines: books, film, museums, editorial, brand. She has worked with Disney/Hyperion, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Macmillan, Ravensburger, Capitol Records, the British Library, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Museum of Jewish Heritage, among others.
Love is her first artist's book conceived entirely as a collectible art object — a project in which the binding, the case, and the mechanic are as much her work as the illustrations inside.
Disney · HarperCollins · Penguin Random House · Macmillan · Ravensburger · Capitol Records · British Library · Los Angeles Times
Limited Edition
Available through the artist's studio. Limited edition — order while available.