Neal Baer Collection

Sadao Hasegawa (b. 1945 Tōkai region, Japan – d. 1999, Bangkok, Thailand) primarily produces drawings of homoerotic love. Hasegawa holistically unifies the legacies of Japanese art of Shunga — a type of erotic art most often made by woodblock print — and spiritual tenets of Thai Buddhism. The inventiveness of his practice transcends simple gay erotic art and reaches towards a quasi-mythological imagery where divine creatures populate magical worlds.

The present work, composed in nine vignettes, was initially conceived for the gay porn magazine Barazoku, Japan’s first commercially circulated gay men’s magazine, and exhibited at SEIBU Shibuya department store, Tokyo, in 1973. It illustrates the artist’s idiosyncratic practice, combining meticuluos drawing with scientific imagery of tropical aquatic creatures by the nineteenth century English naturalist Richard Lydekker, cut from the pages of Harold H. Hart’s 1977 volume The Animal Kingdom. Following a loosely understandable narrative, the story seems to unfold as an erotic encounter between a human figure and a one-eyed Cyclope, interrupted by other mythical creatures such as a dragon similarly expressing lust for a mermaid. One scene of fellatio shows a blacked-out or absented penis, a suggestive silhouette typical of Hasegawa and necessary to evade Japanese censors.

By associating the higher order of mythology and fantasy to the lower part composed by the naturality of animalistic evolution, Hasegawa declaims his own natural history where his syncretic vision emerges in full strength, as a superstructure linking different spiritualities to subterranean, concealed desires and drives.

I have strong interest in Asian men, religion, sense of beauty.
My desire is to create the universe of beauty of men, in a way which differs from Western point of view.
Especially these days, I try to pursuit spiritual, profound beauty and eros rather than a pornographic worlds which is something like furious orgies or sadism and masochism.

—Sadao Hasegawa to Durk Dehner, 13 February 1995

Provenance
a. SQUIRE, London

Exhibitions

“English Companion Inc.,” a. SQUIRE, London, March 8 – April 12 2025

See also

Sadao Hasegawa at Gallery Naruyama