Sadao Hasegawa Satisfies His Carnal Appetites

A naked, muscled youth appears to rocket into space in Sadao Hasegawa’s That Floating Feeling (1980). His body throbs magenta, while his face – impassive as a mask – is crowned by flamelike hair. Both human and ethereal, he exhales a stream of starry breath, while the tips of his fingers sparkle: flesh becoming cosmic.

Commissioned by the Japanese gay magazine Barazoku, the image crystallizes many of the themes of the Tokyo-based graphic artist, who died in 1999. Hasegawa’s erotic fascination with the male body seemed to burst beyond physicality into transcendence. He created his own cosmology – teeming with mythical beasts and hallucinatory romanticism – that found a home in the more earthbound commercial gay press of the 1980s and ’90s. ‘English Companion Inc.’, at a. SQUIRE, is the first time Hasegawa’s work has been exhibited in a solo show outside his native country. Had it not been for Tokyo’s Gallery Naruyama, however, his output might have been lost entirely, after his family declined to manage his estate upon his death.

Though sometimes dubbed the ‘Japanese Tom of Finland’, Hasegawa resists the often-strident machismo of his Finnish forebear. Despite the orgiastic energy that ripples through his scenes, there’s often a soft, dreamy quality to his subjects’ expressions. In one of several inserts from the 1980s for Barazoku magazine, two men engage in oral sex: one tenderly grasps the other’s head, eyes pleated in orgasm. A vitrine in the centre of the gallery contains many of the pencil, ink and collage drawings that were featured in publications. Traces of their printed materiality remain: overlays with instructions for their formatting in Japanese (‘Return required. Original size.’). In our digital age, there’s something almost quaint about this page-bound erotica. It summons a distant world in which pornography, shared among a queer audience amid the threat of censorship, was sublimated into an ecstatic art form. 

Grounded in carnal appetites though Hasegawa’s visions may be, they tend towards metamorphosis. He was influenced by everything from Edo-era shunga to Japanese folklore and Hindu gods. He was less interested in ‘sadism and masochism’, he told Tom of Finland Foundation co-founder Durk Dehner in a 1995 interview, than in creating his own syncretic universe that hymned the ‘beauty of men’. SNOWMAN (c.1980s) depicts a muscle-bound figure posing on the moon, his torso – including his exaggerated cock – crumbling like the surrounding craters. We see the profile of another man in the bottom-right corner, open-mouthed in wonder. Another black and white drawing (Untitled, 1994) features an embrace between two figures that falls somewhere between tender and menacing, the reptilian male succubus clasping his paramour from behind. This time, his penis is only teasingly outlined. A crackling chain of energy ensnares them.

The show’s centrepiece is the wall-hung Untitled (1980s), comprising nine bisected drawings. The bottom section of every image features a reproduction of fauna catalogued by British naturalist Richard Lydekker (incidentally born a stone’s throw from the gallery in Bloomsbury). The upper part features a depiction by Hasegawa of a fruitful and interpenetrating animal kingdom: a place wherein nothing is unnatural and horny abundance reigns. Men lick each other’s feet and tweak their nipples among coral reefs populated by topless mermaids and octopuses waving Japanese flags. A man, tongue hanging out, grasps a penis which resembles a monstrous sea cucumber. While two men fuck, another lounges in his lover’s arms; you can almost feel the electric brush of their stubble and body hair. Unlike Tom of Finland’s men, with their lantern-jawed seriousness and effortful orgies, Hasegawa presents a more playful and languorous world, as sweetly funny as it is explicit. 

‘Sadao Hasegawa: English Companion Inc.’ is on view at a. SQUIRE, London, until 12 April 

^{Main image: Sadao Hasegawa, SNOWMAN (detail), 1980s, pencil, ink and gouache on paper, 18 × 20 cm. Courtesy: a. SQUIRE, London and Gallery Naruyama, Tokyo; photograph: Jack Elliot Edwards}