Sadao Hasegawa
English Companion Inc.
8 March–12 April 2025
Opening: Friday 7 March, 6–8 pm


Brief personal history
Born in 1950. Tell you the truth, I have never had formal training of art.

I was kind of an autistic child who could not enjoy playing with other kids at all, rather, it was even painful for me.
Instead, communing with mother nature, loving flower, animals, and tiny inseccts were my mentor.
It was my supreme happiness when I indulged in revereis, fantasies, and my own paintings.

Although I acquired sociability in my later years, my habit to ‘trip’, to communicate with super-nature still remained and it has become part of the most important source of my inspiration.

My past motif have been Grecian, Indian, Egyptian, Japanese Kabuki, folklore, and Buddhism.
Now I’m enthusiastic about Indonesian and Thai religious motif.

I have strong intereste in Asian men, religion, sense of beauty.
My desire is to create the universe of beauty of men, in a way which differs from Western point of view.
Especially these days, I try to pursuit spiritual, profound beauty and eros rather than a pornographic worlds which is something like furious orgies or sadism and masochism.

I have had exhibitions several times in Japan. Unfortunately, no museums has my work in their collections.
Japanese society is still very concervative and museums are not ready to exhibit Gay art yet.

My work is now published every month on the ‘BARAZOKU’, Japanese gay magazine. This year, a plan is on foot to publish a book of selective pencil-drawings from BARAZOKU.

I travel to Indonesia 3 or 4 times a year, groping new ideas from an cultural exchange between local boys.

—Sadao Hasegawa to Durk Dehner, 13 February 1995

a. SQUIRE is excited to announce an exhibition of works on paper by Sadao Hasegawa (長谷川 サダオ), English Companion Inc., organised in collaboration with Gallery Naruyama, Tokyo. This is the only solo exhibition to materialise outside Japan to date and the first presentation of his work in the UK, 35 years after the publishing of his first English monograph by éditions Aubrey Walter—a rare treasure in its own right.

How to introduce Hasegawa's dazzling universe for the uninitiated? It is starry-eyed and joyous and tender, richly sensual and brimming with fecundity. A hallucinogenic realm of priapic gods and demi-gods, shibari and romance, it is unfettered in its adoration of Asian men's bodies, and in its holism and attention to all living beings, imparts a Buddhist sensibility. It is supremely skilfully rendered, a dissertation in modulation and Day-Glo colours. And whereas any superficial glance might be misdirected to Tom of Finland, its paradisiacal worldbuilding is perhaps far closer, in fact, to Elisàr von Kupffer's.

To many the unparalleled master of Japanese gay erotic art, Hasegawa nonetheless remains an indistinct figure, biographically speaking. He lived in Tokyo, longed to travel to India, and in 1978 began working regularly with publisher Itō Bungaku, who seven years earlier had founded the first commercial gay magazine in Japan, Barazoku (薔薇族). During the earlier half of the 80s, Hasegawa's work gained fast attention domestically, illustrating the pages and covers of Sabu (さぶ), The Adon (アドン), and Samson (月刊サムソン). It was around this time, too, that his images started to appear in gay publications in the West, among them In Touch for Men [I.T.] and Mach (a Drummer title). Indeed, with the exception of a group show organised by Brian Scott Carr at New York's Art Bar at Zippers around 1983, and the sale of his prints through the Tom of Finland Foundation's then-president Durk Dehner, Hasegawa's works were known to audiences outside Japan only via reproductions. He declined various invitations to exhibit abroad, fearful that his drawings and paintings would never make it back through Japanese customs.

"In Bangkok's National Museum, when the guards were not looking, Sadao liked to touch the large stone sculptures of Khmer and Hindu deities, 'for their power'," recalled his friend, the late Berkeley professor Frits Staal. Hasegawa began making frequent trips to Indonesia and Thailand in the 1980s, and with these his syncretic vision of Asia emerged. It was not only a guiding superstructure but also constituted a politics of its own. In his works, Balinese cult pools with Hindu iconography, Thai mythoi and Confucian legend interweave on a seamless plane. Civilisations fuse, and anuses blossom. The artifice of distinctions gives way to the divine, the ghost image of the absented cock—veiled beneath a silken fundoshi or otherwise suggestively silhouetted to evade Japanese censors—the only reminder of a mortal reality to yank everything earthbound.

The works on view in London range from informal esquisses for Barazoku to meticulously fine drawings and one exceptional painting in which the spirit-man body-phallus emanates an ozone glow. A vitrine in the centre of the room contains, among other unseen objects, 5 sheets of the letterheaded paper of a Tokyo import-export company, 'English Companion Inc.', on which Hasegawa sometimes made his studies. To the left, 9 intricate compositions tell of the deep-sea affair between a cyclops, his beefcake, and Hinomaru-waving cocktopus acolytes; and incorporates collaged reproductions of tropical fish, whales, and other aquatic creatures by the nineteenth century English naturalist Richard Lydekker, which Hasegawa cut from the pages of Hart's 1977 volume The Animal Kingdom. (This is Hasegawa's natural history, of which copulating men are a principal part.) Elsewhere in black-and-white, an intergalactic space rock cock hurtles into view, while nearby a mortal and his mythological dreamboat float in fire-whipped embrace, the former's spiked hair delicately scratched into the paper—a Hasegawan signature. Mists of speckled inks form the backgrounds and shadows, behind all of which is Hasegawa's reverence for Edo-period shunga. 'ACT NOW', urges one image of nipple-tweaked ecstasy.

Sadao Hasegawa hung himself in a Bangkok hotel room on the 20^th November 1999. His works, originally discarded by his family, were subsequently retrieved and taken to Akimitsu Naruyama according to his final wishes.


Sadao Hasegawa (b. 1950, Tōkai region, JP–d. 1999, Bangkok, TH) lived and worked in Tokyo, Japan. His 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, in 1973. Posthumous solo exhibitions have been presented at TOGA TRIANGLE, Tokyo (2024), and at Gallery Naruyama, Tokyo (2024, 2023, 2014 and 2000). Recent group exhibitions include Echoes of Mishima, Galerie Pepe, Mexico City (2023); Myth Makers—Spectrosynthesis III, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2022); G, Gallery Naruyama, Tokyo (2017); and Naked Men 1876-2016, Gallery Naruyama, Tokyo (2016). 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.