The erotic drawings of Sadao Hasegawa (1945-1999) distill something singular about the queer sexual experience: its mysticism, its spirituality, its possibility for total transcendence. Arguably Japan’s most important artist of gay erotica, Hasegawa’s oeuvre remains little known outside his home country to this date, a lapse in queer art history that London’s a. SQUIRE gallery is endeavouring to upturn with its most recent exhibition, “English Companion Inc.”, the first solo exhibition of Hasegawa’s work outside of Japan.
The late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz believed that in the fleeting, fragmentary moment of orgasm, there’s also an explosive act of worldbuilding, each sensuous climax vibrant as the death of a star which scatters so many microscopic particles of possibility and potentiality out into the ether. This was the utopic otherworld of ecstasy, a word the etymological descendant of the Greek ekstasis, which translates to “standing outside oneself”, a transcendence that Muñoz – via Heidegger – interrogates as beyond both space and time (although, in many ways, space and time are merely one force, one field, perceived by our minds in different forms). To look at the cosmic erotica of Japanese artist Sadao Hasegawa – where bodies writhe and leak and fuck and themselves explode beyond their neat limitations before celestial backdrops and interplanetary outer-spaces – is then to understand Muñoz’s alchemic assertion: that to fuck is to transcend, to orgasm is to exist momentarily in an ontology and temporality ecstatically untethered from our own.
Such a spiritual exegesis of Hasegawa’s erotica – an artform conventionally reduced as solely corporeal and/or libidinal, as if body and desire can truly be divided, à la Descartes, into separate spheres – is not mere wishful interpretation. Rather, Hasegawa was a devoted student of indiscriminate metaphysical philosophies and traditions which dangle from across the Asian world. “Hasegawa began making frequent trips to Indonesia and Thailand in the 1980s,” writes Archie Squire, the London gallerist and curator behind the first solo exhibition of Hasegawa’s artwork outside Japan, “and with these his syncretic vision of Asia emerged… In his works, Balinese cult pools with Hindu iconography, Thai mythoi and Confucian legend interweave on a seamless plane.”
Beyond this fog-like itinerary of eclectic influences and pilgrim’s journeys, solid details of Hasegawa’s life are nebulous, hard to pin down. He was born in 1945 (although claims to have been born in 1950) and described himself as an “autistic child” who, like a modern-day St Francis of Assisi, “commun[ed] with mother nature” instead of other men; was published in numerous gay magazines in his home country before peddling reproductions westwards through the Tom of Finland Foundation; and eventually hung himself in a Bangkok hotel room on 20 November 1999.
The works on display at a.Squire testify to the gravity-like tension at the core of the artist’s universe. That profound yearning for an erotic, ecstatic transcendence; the gruesome chains of materiality and social-political conservatism that chide any such utopian reverie, what Muñoz derides in his own work as “the quagmire of the present.” Indeed, the chauvinistic encroachment of the latter on the former leaves cruel traces on Hasegawa’s art, as cocks abstracted and hushed into shadows that throb and bulge with an ever-present, almost ghost-like absence.
However, the horny triumph of fantasy is everywhere in the imaginative worlds, some time and place other than here and now, that Hasegawa scrawls. The under-the-oceans antics of hunky cyclops and foot-lovers, juxtaposed playfully with sea-life drawings appropriated from English naturalist Richard Lydekker; a flaming and muscled spirit-body, hurtling asteroid-like through space and who breathes from his pursed and fuckable lips an entire waxing cosmos, resplendent with possibility; and a once-flesh body now radiating stardust and solidifying suddenly into eternal stone as if a six-packed Galatea moving in reverse, poised to bring entire planets to orgasm – fleeting, fragmentary, and ecstatic orgasm – with one well-poised thrust of a craggy, rock-hard prick.
English Companion Inc., a solo exhibition of Sadao Hasegawa’s artwork, is on display at a. SQUIRE gallery, London, until 12 April.
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