Cybernetic Dreams

hajime sorayama and harumi Yamaguchi brought sex to the japanese market. united by a rebellious spirit, the illustrators sat down with gallerist shinji nanzuka.

By Morgan Becker

Sex sells, and art follows fads—two maxims Hajime Sorayama knows well. Born in 1947, the illustrator grew up side-by-side with the American pin-up. Soldiers had torn down their posters of battledress-clad beauties, urging Give ’em hell, boys! as propeller planes soared high overhead; Bettie Page and Playboy Playmates came to take their place—while 10,000 kilometers away, in Imabari, Ehime, Japan, a teenage Sorayama had a go at dreaming up his own ultimate woman.

All the while, Harumi Yamaguchi—Sorayama’s senior by just over a decade—chipped away at what would be their joint path. From art school in Tokyo, she went into ad work, devising a crew of long-limbed, fantastic women who’d go on to define her practice. “Harumi Gals” are always technicolor, on the cusp of outright seduction. At their most iconic, they’re somewhat uncanny: falling off skateboards, chomping at leafy greens, or mid-shout, blue eyes wide in surprise.

Sorayama’s beloved “Sexy Robots” were likewise airbrushed and hyper-realistic. These chrome-y provocateurs raised their fair share of eyebrows, explicitly erotic in an artistic age unsure of its tolerance for vulgarity. Lust, to Sorayama, is a human virtue, but his drawings reckon with much more than that—parsing fantasy and base desire; automation and freedom; East and West; the male gaze; commercial art, fine art, and smut.

For Beyond Noise, the pair met with Shinji Nanzuka, founder of Nanzuka Underground. The Harajuku-based gallery champions “outsider art,” resisting white walls and chasing collaboration (the sort that’s long-served each illustrator’s career, Harumi via Nodaleto and Stüssy, and Sorayama with Dior and Stella McCartney). Here, they stroll down memory lane, talking taboo, superstardom, and the weight of their quintessential works.

SHINJI NANZUKA: Sorayama-san, you started using an airbrush after seeing [Harumi-san’s] work, correct?

HAJIME SORAYAMA: Actually, not really. I started using airbrushes on plastic models. Then I found out that there were people who were using an airbrush to draw—Harumi-san and Olivia De Berardinis. I was drawing pin-ups at that time, but I needed to differentiate my work, so I took to eroticism.

SN: You weren’t using airbrushes at the start though, in the ’70s.

HS: No one taught me how to use them. I just thought they were for painting solid blocks. I didn’t use an airbrush for shading.

HARUMI YAMAGUCHI I didn’t learn how to use them either. I went to an art shop and found an airbrush and started spraying around for background blurring effects. I then tried actually drawing with it and realized it was pretty interesting.

HS: True, the airbrush was originally for shading and not for sketching.

SN: There was literally no one drawing people with an airbrush at that time.

HS: Beginners tend to be overwhelmed by airbrushing. It was difficult to find anyone who had mastered how to use an airbrush. So I learned from people who had mastered this art—basically stealing their technique. I didn’t have a particularly good feeling looking at Harumi-san’s painstakingly disciplined work.

SN: I made all sorts of mistakes [when I] started learning.

HS: Then people started calling me the airbrush person and I got invited to an airbrush event in the US. I’d say stuff as if I knew stuff, and I would look around and realize that everyone was so much better than me! [Laughs]

Have you seen anyone who draws table borders?

SN: What is a table border?

HS: The thinnest outline you see in a newspaper—you draw that line.

HY: There is the table border and the back-ruled line, and the back-ruled line is thicker.

SN: Isn’t that because of the differences in nozzle size and pressure?

HS: No, no. It’s a technique. You have to hold your breath.

HY: You need to hold your breath no matter what with an airbrush.

HS: I don’t use airbrushes now at all. If I hold my breath, I might get a stroke. [Laughs]

SN: Airbrushing is bad for you physically.

HS: Some foreign newspaper [will write], “Sorayama died of airbrushing.” [Laughs]

HY: In reality, though, a really talented Japanese airbrush artist died in his 30s.

HS: Your lungs become like plastic, filled with acrylic.

HY: I used to wear two layers of face masks.

SN: Sorayama-san, do you recall when you first saw Harumi-san’s work?

HS: I don’t remember, but it was around the time she was at [department stores] PARCO and Seibu.

I joined [the advertising agency] Asatsu in 1969 when I was 22 years old. I diligently did many drawings at the office but I didn’t really draw privately. I was making loads of plastic, radio-controlled yachts. At that time, Harumi-san was already a mega-superstar.

SN: Sorayama-san and Harumi-san, your illustration art from that period is still valued as art today.

HS: I am embarrassed about that. Harumi-san probably had respect and was treated preferentially, but I was just a gofer. They made me draw four pages of work in two days—a very realistic drawing in such a short period of time. Harumi-san must have been given more time, she was the queen of the industry!

HY: I worked on a commission basis at both Seibu and PARCO. I never became an employee. At Seibu, all female employees had to wear this weird uniform that was between blue, green, and gray. I told the manager at the advertising department that I was never going to be an employee because I loathed the uniform.

SN: So it was more a problem of fashion than employment status. [Laughs] There was a sense of hyperrealism within the art scene, not only in the illustration world—for example, the artist Kaoru Ueda.

HS: I worked in the advertising industry, as you know. So when hyperrealism became trendy in the art scene, advertising started to mimic it a bit. For the artists, it was life or death. But for us in the advertising industry, there were many disposable people doing the work. Back then, there were a couple dozen people doing realism. Hardly anyone is doing that now.

SN: So true—no one does it now.

HS: That’s because they were simply doing it as a job. It wasn’t that they liked realism, they were just following the fad.

SN: There are hardly any artists that are still known today who were in the hyperrealism scene. Sorayama-san, you had a huge impact on young artists today who are in the hyperrealism scene.

HS: That’s because I happened to be popular and sell a lot. After all, art is also a fad. There is nothing ubiquitous.

SN: Sex is something ubiquitous.

HS: That is right. I’ve been saying appetite and libido are both virtues of humanity.

SN: If Sorayama-san’s Sexy Robot had been a male robot, it probably wouldn’t have been renowned for this long.

HS: In the past, there were no female robots. It was too uncouth. There were only male robots with boobs. Michelangelo didn’t use female models during the Renaissance.

SN: You’ve been saying this forever, but things are like this because Christianity banned nudity during the Middle Ages.

HS: Right. In my rebellious spirit, I drew Mary cradling Jesus, and you can see I drew Mary’s pubic hair. It’s common to draw pubic hair these days, but it wasn’t back then. I was only able to do this because I am not a Christian.

SN: To begin with, the cultural roots of self-control come from totally different places between the West and the East.

HS: Very true. It was Osamu Tezuka and Go Nagai who started depicting humanoid robots as heroes. It was unheard of for the Western audience.

SN: Harumi Gals—these types of drawings don’t really exist in Europe. Illustrations that essentially celebrate women’s sexuality.

HS: Some drew pin-ups, but those were mainly men. And they were all second-rate artists. The only female artists who did this type of work were Harumi and Olivia De Berardinis.

SN: Harumi-san, you do draw female nudes, but your expression and your aestheticism are not a direct depiction as they are in pornography. Is there a conscious line between pin-ups and pornography among illustration artists?

HS: There is no boundary for me. They are all the same. Japan made female nudity a taboo between the Meiji era and the World War II. In America, they painted pin-ups on fighter planes that protected the country. That’s the natural way of treating human desire. If you did that in Japan, there would be a meeting called immediately to discuss military law. That’s how free America was. That America is becoming very conservative as we speak.

SN: After the war, Japanese advertisements used beautiful Western models very frequently. Did this feel like they were bringing in freedom, democracy, and [American] values?

HS: It was simply dazzling. I was completely affected and inspired by Western things. We are the generation that was brainwashed by the West. When I do an exhibition abroad, they ask me why I don’t draw Japanese people or Black people. I am simply drawing for the market and picking and choosing what I draw. I’ve drawn many Black people and Japanese people. I adjust my work to the largest market. If I were to write a novel, I would write it in English.

SN: Harumi-san, your drawing of women intentionally mixes race.

SN: That’s because drawing Japanese [people] is too hard. Westerners tend to have more curves, more pronounced convexity and concavity.

HS: When you draw a Japanese person, people tend to try and identify the face. It never stays anonymous; I found that particularly hard. I keep drawing women as Venus—strong and independent.

SN: Sorayama-san, you have a big feminist fan group. That’s why you are still thriving. If one truly understands aestheticism, one knows that Sorayama-san’s work is not created to satisfy one’s sexual curiosity.

HS: Then the question is, why does Japan not appreciate it?

SN: Because they can’t understand it. The ability to truly value aestheticism has not been cultivated here. The reason is simply education. I think they just don’t teach you how to understand context or read between the lines from the early years.

HS: This is why it’s uncomfortable here. But then again, there is freedom because of this. The underground culture of Japan is totally unconstrained.

SN: That is true. There is a space where you are forgiven because you do not understand. People won’t attack or question you if they don’t have the capacity to understand the subject matter. Paradoxically, this is also why Japan is a safe place. I would imagine the US has it the hardest. Europe has a historical framework where you cannot ignore nudity or expressions of sexuality in the art world; therefore, there is a sense that priority is given to freedom of expression over social justice and its criticism of expressions of sexuality.

By the way, Harumi-san, when did you discover Sorayama-san’s work?

SN: I don’t remember exactly when but I remember thinking that a wonderful work of art had suddenly appeared. I recall it was around the time of Sexy Robot.

SN: When did you two first meet?

HS: It was in the ’80s at a sushi bar. Someone introduced us. |I brought Harumi’s book, Harumi Gals. I’d always known her honorable face, of course, but only from afar. We’d never spoken. I was so nervous, but I asked for an autograph and a kiss mark on the semi-nude photo of the queen herself. If she asked me to lick her shoe, I would have. [Laughs] Unfortunately, she didn’t ask me to.