Picture this: a celestial hunk is preparing to touch down on a distant planet.
Rock-hard, superhuman pecs give way to actual stone as his colossal body transforms to resemble the craggy landscape below. An engorged, hard-rock cock protrudes, semi erect, in the direction of the planet’s similarly-chiselled inhabitant. Understandably, the latter can do little else but await this libidinous invasion, a mix of horror and arousal on his face.
This is so often the fate of the muscular, painstakingly-rendered subjects of Sadao Hasegawa (1945-1999). Arguably Japan’s foremost creator of homoerotic art, the self-taught painter and draughtsman produced innumerable works from his home in Tokyo, inspired by a heady concoction of pan-Asian cultural references and pure, unadulterated horniness. English Companion Inc. (8 March – 12 April 2025), a new show at London’s a. SQUIRE gallery is the first and only solo exhibition of Hasegawa’s work to be mounted outside of Japan to date. Featuring a select portfolio of works on paper, including preparatory sketches and experimental collages, English Companion Inc. offers rare insight into the diverse processes behind Hasegawa’s images.
Speaking to i-D in the aftermath of the show’s opening, the gallery’s owner Archie Squire is keen to emphasise the significance of this trove of works being experienced by broader international audiences. “Hasegawa refused many exhibition offers abroad [in his lifetime]—he was worried, quite legitimately, that his works would be intercepted by Japanese customs on their way back to him,” he says. “They are such tender, numinous, irreducible images, and it’s astounding to me that they have never been seen in person in the UK until now—especially given that 35 years have passed since the London-based Gay Men’s Press published a cult English monograph on him.”
The title of the a. SQUIRE show, English Companion Inc., refers to a Tokyo import-export company of the same name, with which Hasegawa may have had some connection. Pencil sketches on slips of paper bear the company’s letterhead, a number of which are featured by the gallery. “The title also opens up a rift in Hasegawa’s work,” Squire says, “between his earlier attention, in the 1970s, to archetypal Western masculinities, and the shift he undergoes in the ‘80s to focus almost exclusively on Asian men.”
Hasegawa’s preoccupation with piercingly handsome, muscular male subjects, rendered with an airbrushed sheen, has led to inevitable comparisons to Tom of Finland—that ever-present spectre of gay erotica. However, it was his distinct sense of spirituality and cosmopolitanism that eventually set him apart, not just from Tom, but also from his fellow Japanese homoeroticists, who tended towards more conservative visions of homosexuality. “‘Afrofuturism’ is a well-established concept today,” Squire points out, “but I’d suggest that Hasegawa was envisioning a kind of Asian futurism in his works for which there’s no equivalent terminology.”
Beyond a few anecdotal snippets that have found their way into English texts, very little is known about Hasegawa’s personal life, which only fuels ongoing fascination with his work and the stimuli behind it. Originally from Japan’s central Tōkai region, the artist spent his adult life in Tokyo, immersing himself in the capital’s burgeoning postwar queer scene, publishing his works in gay publications such as Barazoku and Samson. This urban existence was punctuated by regular trips to Southeast Asia, where Hasegawa became entranced by the mythologies and religious motifs of Thailand and Indonesia.
“My desire is to create a universe of beauty of men, in a way which differs from a Western point of view”
sadao hasegawa
As his practice developed over the years, Hasegawa began to weave these references to Southeast Asian spirituality into an aesthetic approach with roots in Japanese ‘shunga’ erotica and Western-inspired physique drawings. “My desire is to create [a] universe of beauty of men, in a way which differs from [a] Western point of view,” Hasegawa wrote in a 1995 letter to Durk Dehner, the then-president of the Tom of Finland Foundation, who facilitated sales of Hasegawa’s prints to collectors during the artist’s lifetime. The result was arguably more akin to a multiverse, with countless scenes—from the phantasmic to the achingly intimate—combining over the years to create a bright collision of past, present and future.
Demonstrating this flattening of time (and space) in practice, nine small collages from the ‘80s, framed together for English Companion Inc., combine Hasegawa’s pencil-drawn scenes of mythological gay sex with illustrations repurposed from a natural history book. The resulting equivalence, between real and mythological creatures, could be read as an attempt by Hasegawa to bolster the presence of gay relationships throughout millennia, pushing back against conservative programmes of erasure.
Sadly, the artist took his own life in 1999, bringing his mesmeric exploration of Asian queer experience to an untimely end. In a merciful twist of fate, Hasegawa’s archive was handed over to Tokyo’s Gallery Naruyama, per the artist’s wishes, after his family backtracked on their initial decision to destroy what they believed to be a collection of unsavoury images. “The fact that everything shown here might have been lost then is unfathomable,” Squire says of the change of heart that preserved a seminal body of work. “Hasegawa’s works are precious. He seems to have been yearning for a softer, kinder, gentler world.”
All images courtesy of a. SQUIRE, London; and Gallery Naruyama, Tokyo