It’s easy to write about Hiroshi Nagai’s paintings when the sun is shining.
I found out about Nagai while scrolling TikTok recently.
Nagai’s work took me off to this nostalgic world of peachy sunsets and palms and strange urban beaches.
Why did this stuff create tingles in the videogame part of my brain?
Maybe Nagai simply reminded me of OutRun - OutRun but also Hockney.
Later that day I looked Nagai up and discovered that he did in fact exist outside of TikTok.
Born in 1947, Nagai wanted to go to art school, inspired by his father’s oil paintings.
Nagai’s been haunting me a bit since that first TikTok.
I can’t stop rewatching it and digging around for his stuff on eBay.
I can’t stop browsing his prints on places like Etsy.
City Pop is the magic ingredient to an appreciation of Nagai’s work, I reckon.
You’ll get the tight snarl and squeal of a guitar, but no one element ever dominates.
Everything in the song feels held in a careful tension.
It’s slick and artificial, and that’s the point.
You want to visit bars, but only hotel bars.
There’s a lot of this to Nagai’s imagery.
Cityscapes, poolsides, beaches.
Only water’s really allowed to get close to the viewer.
Red lights on the corners of skyscrapers, perfect game boards of lit midnight windows.
But it’s just a towel.
It’s still absence.
It’s still Nagai being Nagai.
Where is all this?
It’s hard to tell, but a lot of Nagai pictures have distinct aspects of both places.
Wayfarers, then, but they’re Tom Cruise’s Wayfarers.
The thing is, I ask these questions because I love these spaces.
Nagai’s work really speaks to me.
Nagai’s paintings are all dream estates for me.
How are they done?
I go online and it seems to be a big question others have about Nagai’s work.
Elsewhere I discovered that little rounds of lights placed to invoke distant traffic were not uniform.
