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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/woqaku/the_fully_s...
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.
I'd never heard of this artist before and I absolutely love his aesthetic.
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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 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
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 :)
Apart from the visual aesthetic, english lyrics and music genre are also a big sign of American influence.
Eiichi Ohtaki - A Long Vacation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5Ox44_7puU
Won best album of 1981 per the Japan Record Awards.