Born in 1947, Sorayama came of age in post-WWII Japan, and traces his metal fetish back to childhood years spent admiring machinery in his industrial hometown. By high school, the self-taught illustrator shifted his focus toward a new “mania:” pin-ups. Despite his natural gift for drawing, Sorayama had plenty of other career ambitions—such as becoming a pilot, a sword smith or a temple carpenter—before enrolling in university to study Greek and English literature. He was forced to forfeit his academic pursuits after creating and circulating an erotic magazine on campus called Pink Journal. The publication, which lampooned his professors, resulted in his expulsion—and kickstarted his career as a freelance illustrator.
Sorayama’s love of ancient Greece has long loomed over his storied career, which is in many ways a contemporary retelling of the myth of Pygmalion: a sculptor who, in attempting to remedy the flaws of mortal women, creates a statue so perfect that he falls in love with it. In 1983, Sorayama fused his various fixations into singular artistic entities––pin-ups with metal flesh known as “gynoids.” In an almost Warholian fashion, Sorayama’s horny brand of futurism has become the stuff of legend. His iconography has transgressed the confines of the art world and reverberated throughout the realms of fashion, film and music, earning him a laundry list of esteemed collaborators such as Thierry Mugler, George Lucas, Dior, Aerosmith, Stella McCartney, Marvel, Richardson, and 032c summer cover star, The Weeknd.
Though his visions are high-tech, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to decode the timelessness and breadth of his work’s appeal or the immediacy of its impact. One of the most refreshing aspects of Sorayama’s work—beyond its optimism—is its simplicity. In industries where depth and nuance are fetishized, Sorayama’s shameless obsession with things like beautiful women, weapons, robots and wild animals is delightfully straightforward. His infatuation with this subject matter will never expire, and neither, it seems, will the public’s attraction to them.
In recent interviews, he’s dropped zingers like: “hard work is proof of incompetence,” and “to be quite honest, it’s porn,” when asked to categorize his work. On the occasion of the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, Desire Machines, at the MoSex in Miami, 032c asked Sorayama a few burning questions.
