Hiroshi Nagai: Japan's Sun-Drenched Americana | Hacker News Reader

Hiroshi Nagai: Japan's Sun-Drenched Americana

tokyocowboy.co

294 pointsneom47 comments

Japanese artistic depictions of America have an interesting way of having an "accent" so to speak but in a manner that doesn't mistranslate but rather adds something unique to it. I'm reminded of a series of illustrations from the 1800s explaining the American revolution for a Japanese audience where all the depictions of the important historical characters look like traditional samurai drawings and they take on a sort of mythological character to them. Its like different enough to appreciate that its different while also familiar enough to understand what its saying.

https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/woqaku/the_fully_s...

Interesting point. I feel the same about the old SNES classic, Earthbound.

It was a different perspective on America, making small towns and suburbia (a sometimes looked down upon aspect of the country) look appreciated, cozy, nice.

Small towns and suburbia are wildly different (and arguably contradictory terms).

Japan doesn't have suburbs in the same way as the US, small towns often look and feel the same as the outskirts of major cities; although very small towns, as depicted in the Hamaguchi's most recent film Evil Does not Exist, are qualitatively different from both.

My wife kindly got me two books of his art for Christmas last year. They took forever to arrive from Japan but very much worth the weight. The aesthetic is a very particular view of the 1980s that was also reflected in TV shows like Miami Vice, and the choice of palette is very … Amiga. I wonder if the designers of that computer and its Workbench desktop environment were influenced by his use of colour.

I wonder if early Sonic the Hedgehog games were influenced by his art. The beaches, cityscapes, and palm trees all look similar.

They were indeed!

That's an astute observation, especially when I think of all the earliest Sonic marketing material illustrations that came out of Japan.

Could I trouble you for the titles?

I'd never heard of this artist before and I absolutely love his aesthetic.

Sure, I'll have a look when I get home.

Can't edit my original response to you but the books are "Time goes by..." and "Tropical Modern", both by Hiroshi Nagai. Enjoy!

Hah! If you want to step into a Hiroshi Nagai painting as a 3D world, that's basically what happens in my Ambient Garden project. In fact I was surprised that nobody ever pointed it out despite all the visitors: https://ambient.garden/

Editing to respond to multiple replies: Yes, he's painted a series of landscapes with that specific pointillism technique. The best I could find is a pretty random link, but it might be the most relevant painting: https://fortinbrah.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/...

The dots make that site look very pointillist to me, and the colors are pretty impressionistic too. And it's just paths through a hilly landscape with trees as far as I can tell, none of the beaches or architectural and urban settings in Hiroshi Nagai's paintings. Maybe I'm missing something though.

This is more impressionist pointillist than Nagai’s airbrush style.

Excellent, edit, that painting looks almost exactly like your world to me. Very cool project.

I discovered city-pop through vaporwave genre. Initially, I thought these stylish Japanese album covers were contemporary and inspired by vaporwave - turns out it was the other way around! The original 80s city-pop aesthetic actually influenced vaporwave's visual style decades later.

I’ve streamed city pop playlists while working and never realized city pop was a 70’s and 80’s thing. That’s kind of a funny thing about modern music streaming services— the music is just there and there’s no context. It never occurred to me that I was listening to 30 or 40 year old music…

It’s funny that you mention that the era of the music. Gen X–Millennials in Japan are likely to associate it with fun but extremely unhip* cafes and restaurants that started disappearing circa 2010 as the women running them hit retirement age.

*The cafes themselves were fine, but their chain smoking, 50-60+ clientele were not the kind of people your average young adult would want to hang out with. There’s only so many times you can get praised for your youth, asked about school or college or your job or when you’re getting married without going crazy. lol

Here is the artist’s website http://www.hiroshinagai.com/contents.html

Very interesting website as well. I like to enter throught the home URL:

http://hiroshinagai.com/

It's funny his BBS service says they were going dark in 2022. I was also curious how he sells things and it took some searching to find:

http://hiroshinagai.com/fmcd/collectors/collectors_catalog/c...

Or you can go to his gallery in person :)

A lot of Tetsuro Yamashita's album covers use this illustration style: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=RDEMliH6yv_-S5Z3VNUdGlcyfA...

Apart from the visual aesthetic, english lyrics and music genre are also a big sign of American influence.

Imagine seeing Hiroshi Nagai on HN! He's one of my favorite artists. As far as I know, his son sells prints out of various locations in Tokyo, and keeps hopping around. It takes some effort to find him but when you do, the prints are not too expensive. I like to imagine it's a "show us you really want this art" thing, but not in terms of money.

If you haven't heard of the musical genre before, here's a decent example:

Eiichi Ohtaki - A Long Vacation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5Ox44_7puU

Won best album of 1981 per the Japan Record Awards.

Nagai’s work is really interesting for the feeling it produces. I first came across it on subreddits dedicated to imagery of liminal spaces[0], which several of his pieces can be classified as.

Some of Edward Hopper’s pieces give off similar vibes despite coming from an entirely different era and background.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminal_space_(aesthetic)

Hiroshi Nagai is the first time I felt art resonate with me

All of a sudden I appreciated art!

You’ve never resonated with a movie, a song, or a TV episode?

Can't say this is the only piece of art I've appreciated, but there's definitely something deeply nostalgic about his work. It's almost an idealized version of my childhood.

Should not surprise you on this forum. Many such examples.

Why do you think there is so much excitement about AI art?

Oh my god I thought I was the only one that noticed this. People stereotype science and math people as being anti-humanist or unappreciative of the culture of art but in my experience people there are far more "rounded" compared to tech spaces, its such a culture shock.

I would speculate that science and math communities are formed much more around university education than tech is. University education has elective classes and the exposure to others is much greater than if you learnt your trade from blog posts on the internet.

Yes, I typed that too fast

I guess “paintings” is the right word here

Nevertheless the strongest association in my brain to the word “art” are probably paintings

It’s music for the eyes. Paintings don’t have to be realistic. Abstract visuals can really tickle your brain. This can be a great starting point to go on a new journey and discover what you like.

Very reminiscent of 90s video game city sceneries. Car and motorcycle racing games come to mind.

Yeah, I was thinking late 80's, but I guess cruisin' USA could be one of them (1994)

The first thing I thought was that they look like the backgrounds of lego city set boxes in the 90's.

Nagai's work seems to have been an inspiration for the late 1980's/early 90's Sega aesthetic (OutRun, Sonic, etc.)

OutRun specifically was influenced by the artwork and music of Naoya Matsuoka & Wesing’s 1982 album The September Wind. https://youtu.be/TxEf4OKheNc

Maybe they call it 1950s, but to me this oozes late 80's video games.

Sierra.

Interesting, a Japanese view of old America. I think I can see a bit of Japanese influence in the paintings. I think the paintings are quite good and end up being nostalgic.

The one with the rectangles representing reflections in the water is incredible. You can track each strip of rectangles to a city feature, and they are subtly different, in a way that makes sense.

These are great pictures. I'd love to see a sequel to the old arcade game Out Run done in this style.

Beautiful. This reminds me of the artwork in games like Streets of Rage. Something about the 80s and early 90s vibe washes over these artworks.

My candidate for peak 80s is Megazone 23: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXyg9Obldmg (1980s idea of what the 1980s would look like in the 2300s; those generation ship architects even committed to scanlines on their CRTs)

You even had the same vibe as EVE on both sides of the Iron Curtain,

whether west: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2hawbp5XT4

or east: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI59CbJ2EcQ

Very interesting blog overall, loved the mud entities festival and the baby crying competition

Somewhat similar to EGA graphics

Oh nice I have seen a lot of these in future funk songs as song covers

City pop I think too

Now I know where Poolsuite came from: https://poolsuite.net

Warning: sound

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