Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to announce representation of the estate of Sadao Hasegawa. The most significant Japanese fetish artist of his generation, Hasegawa was a peerless draftsman, illustrator, and painter whose boundary-pushing, erotic art forged new horizons of beauty and desire. The gallery will present three important paintings by the artist for its Kabinett presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach.
“My desire is to create [a] universe of beauty of men,” Hasegawa wrote in 1995, “in a way which differs from the Western point of view.” In Hasegawa’s work, dazzling colors, evenly shaded grounds, and smooth, chiseled physiques populate fantastical playgrounds of metamorphosis and sadomasochism. Occupying the tradition of erotic illustration, Hasegawa drew on a wide array of sources, incorporating references to Southeast Asian mysticism, Japanese folklore, science fiction, and Ovidian myth. The results, at once sensuous and utopian, point not only to sexual pleasure but to unfettered spiritual release.
Born in 1945 in the Tōkai region of Japan, Hasegawa spent his early adulthood in Tokyo, immersed in the city’s gay nightlife. Largely self-taught, he published illustrations in gay magazines including Barazoku, Sabu, The Adon, MLMW, and Samson. Initially, his work closely followed the precedent of Tom of Finland and, especially, the Japanese fetish artist Go Mishima, but, through the 1980s, a series of transformative trips to Indonesia and Thailand led to profound changes in his approach. Through the final years of his life, the artist’s work became enveloped with quasi-psychedelic profusions of Tantric symbols and Southeast Asian landscapes, Buddhist statuary and cosmic backdrops, jungle animals and tropical plants. These ecstatic, skillfully rendered scenes of overlapping motifs limn a pan-Asian paradise where the erotic and spiritual commingle and become one.
Hasegawa’s work was the subject of just one known solo show during his lifetime, Sadao Hasegawa’s Alchemism-Meditation for 1973, at SEIBU Shibuya department store, Tokyo. Though his work was distributed in internationally in the gay press, he declined to send his work abroad, fearful Japanese customs authorities would seize it upon its return. As such, physical examples of his art have rarely been seen outside of Japan.
Garth Greenan Gallery’s representation of Hasegawa’s estate continues its history of giving an international platform to overlooked and underrepresented artists. The presentation in Miami follows closely on the heels of a critically celebrated exhibition of Hasegawa’s work at a. SQUIRE in London in the spring of 2025.
Posthumous solo exhibitions have been presented at TOGA TRIANGLE (2024, Tokyo), and at Gallery Naruyama (2024, 2023, 2014, 2000, Tokyo). Recent group exhibitions include Echoes of Mishima, Galerie Pepe (2023, Mexico City); Myth Makers—Spectrosynthesis III, Tai Kwun Contemporary (2022, Hong Kong); G, Gallery Naruyama (2017, Tokyo); and Naked Men 1876–2016, Gallery Naruyama (2016, Tokyo). His works are held in the collections of the Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS; the Sunpride Foundation, Hong Kong; and the Tom of Finland Foundation, Los Angeles, CA.
Sadao Hasegawa is represented outside of New York by Gallery Naruyama, Tokyo.