A unadorned, muscled youth seems to rocket into house in Sadao Hasegawa’s That Floating Feeling (1980). His physique throbs magenta, whereas his face – emotionless as a masks – is topped by flamelike hair. Each human and ethereal, he exhales a stream of starry breath, whereas the information of his fingers sparkle: flesh turning into cosmic.
Commissioned by the Japanese homosexual journal Barazoku, the picture crystallizes most of the themes of the Tokyo-based graphic artist, who died in 1999. Hasegawa’s erotic fascination with the male physique appeared to burst past physicality into transcendence. He created his personal cosmology – teeming with legendary beasts and hallucinatory romanticism – that discovered a house within the extra earthbound industrial homosexual press of the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s. ‘English Companion Inc.’, at a. SQUIRE, is the primary time Hasegawa’s work has been exhibited in a solo present outdoors his native nation. Had it not been for Tokyo’s Gallery Naruyama, nonetheless, his output may need been misplaced completely, after his household declined to handle his property upon his loss of life.
Although typically dubbed the ‘Japanese Tom of Finland’, Hasegawa resists the often-strident machismo of his Finnish forebear. Regardless of the orgiastic vitality that ripples via his scenes, there’s typically a tender, dreamy high quality to his topics’ expressions. In one in every of a number of inserts from the Nineteen Eighties for Barazoku journal, two males interact in oral intercourse: one tenderly grasps the opposite’s head, eyes pleated in orgasm. A vitrine within the centre of the gallery accommodates most of the pencil, ink and collage drawings that had been featured in publications. Traces of their printed materiality stay: overlays with directions for his or her formatting in Japanese (‘Return required. Authentic dimension.’). In our digital age, there’s one thing virtually quaint about this page-bound erotica. It summons a distant world wherein pornography, shared amongst a queer viewers amid the specter of censorship, was sublimated into an ecstatic artwork type.
Grounded in carnal appetites although Hasegawa’s visions could also be, they have an inclination in direction of metamorphosis. He was influenced by every thing from Edo-era shunga to Japanese folklore and Hindu gods. He was much less serious about ‘sadism and masochism’, he advised Tom of Finland Basis co-founder Durk Dehner in a 1995 interview, than in creating his personal syncretic universe that hymned the ‘great thing about males’. SNOWMAN (c.Nineteen Eighties) depicts a muscle-bound determine posing on the moon, his torso – together with his exaggerated cock – crumbling like the encompassing craters. We see the profile of one other man within the bottom-right nook, open-mouthed in marvel. One other black and white drawing (Untitled, 1994) options an embrace between two figures that falls someplace between tender and menacing, the reptilian male succubus clasping his paramour from behind. This time, his penis is simply teasingly outlined. A crackling chain of vitality ensnares them.
The present’s centrepiece is the wall-hung Untitled (Nineteen Eighties), comprising 9 bisected drawings. The underside part of each picture includes a replica of fauna catalogued by British naturalist Richard Lydekker (by the way born a stone’s throw from the gallery in Bloomsbury). The higher half includes a depiction by Hasegawa of a fruitful and interpenetrating animal kingdom: a spot whereby nothing is unnatural and sexy abundance reigns. Males lick one another’s toes and tweak their nipples amongst coral reefs populated by topless mermaids and octopuses waving Japanese flags. A person, tongue hanging out, grasps a penis which resembles a monstrous sea cucumber. Whereas two males fuck, one other lounges in his lover’s arms; you’ll be able to virtually really feel the electrical brush of their stubble and physique hair. Not like Tom of Finland’s males, with their lantern-jawed seriousness and effortful orgies, Hasegawa presents a extra playful and languorous world, as sweetly humorous as it’s specific.
‘Sadao Hasegawa: English Companion Inc.’ is on view at a. SQUIRE, London, till 12 April
Important picture: Sadao Hasegawa, SNOWMAN (element), Nineteen Eighties, pencil, ink and gouache on paper, 18 × 20 cm. Courtesy: a. SQUIRE, London and Gallery Naruyama, Tokyo; {photograph}: Jack Elliot Edwards
