Sadao Hasegawa

A naked, muscled youth appears to rocket into space in Sadao Hasegawa’s That Floating Feeling (1980). His body throbs magenta, while his face - impassive as a mask - is crowned by flamelike hair. Both human and ethereal, he exhales a stream of starry breath, while the tips of his fingers sparkle: flesh becoming cosmic.

- Daniel Culpan

Commissioned by the Japanese gay magazine Barazoku, the image crystallizes many of the themes of the Tokyo-based graphic artist, who died in 1999, Hasegawa’s erotic fascination with the male body seemed to burst beyond physicality into transcendence. He created his own cosmology - teeming with mythical beasts and hallucinatory romanticism - that found a home in the more earthbound commercial gay press of the 1980s and '90s. 'English Companion Inc.', at a.

SQUIRE, is the first time Hasegawa’s work has been exhibited in a solo show outside of his native country. Had it not been for Tokyo's Gallery Naruyama, however, his output might have been lost entirely, after his family declined to manage his estate upon his death.

Though sometimes dubbed the ‘Japanese Tom of Finland’, Hasegawa resists the often-strident machismo of his Finnish forebear. Despite the orgiastic energy that ripples through his scenes, there’s often a soft, dreamy quality to his subjects’ expressions. In one of several inserts from the 1980s for