It’s easy to write about Hiroshi Nagai’s paintings when the sun is shining. Nagai is a poet of summers past – the blue-sky days, sure, but also the rosy dusks and those nights where you step outside and the air feels perfectly still. I found out about Nagai while scrolling TikTok recently. His precisely rendered images flashed up before me and I instantly lost the grasp of whatever else I was thinking at the time. Nagai’s work took me off to this nostalgic world of peachy sunsets and palms and strange urban beaches. Who is this? 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. According to a great piece I read on Tokyo Cowboy, Nagai was unable to get a place on a course and instead worked for a set decorator in Tokyo before his own career took off. Thanks to his prolific creation of album covers, his work eventually became a visual signature for the Japanese City Pop movement of the 1970s and ’80s – a movement that blended everything from funk, disco and soft rock to create shimmering cinematic confections with an “urban feel”.
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. To fully get the Nagai experience, yesterday I took an hour to put on a City Pop playlist and lay back on the sofa just out of the sun, scrolling through his paintings on my phone.
