HIROSHI NAGAI

Born in 1947, Hiroshi Nagai grew up in the Japanese countryside, where art reached no further than his high school classes. Everything opened up in Tokyo, and then in 1973, on a forty-day journey across America.

He still remembers stepping out of San Francisco airport — the sunlight, the parked cars casting deep black shadows. It was already the scene he would spend a lifetime painting.

Yet he never painted what he saw. His South Seas and his Los Angeles are the ones imagined from Japan, reconstructed from books, photo collections, interior design magazines and postcards. Memory, he says, would tie the work too closely to himself.

His eye was formed by mid-century design and by American films of the sixties and early seventies. Drawn first to surrealism, then to American pop art, he settled between the two: a landscape that is calm, almost dark, bathed in a light strong enough to make it glow.

The absence of figures came by instinct rather than decision — critics noticed it before he did. With no one in the frame, the space stays open and anyone can step into it.

The city pop album covers that made his name were never sought; musicians came to him. Fifty years on, a digital generation raised on vaporwave keeps returning to those early paintings. In 2025, Sato Gallery presented his first exhibition in France.