Japanese artistic depictions of America have an interesting way of having an "accent" so to speak but in a manner that doesn't mistranslate but rather adds something unique to it. I'm reminded of a series of illustrations from the 1800s explaining the American revolution for a Japanese audience where all the depictions of the important historical characters look like traditional samurai drawings and they take on a sort of mythological character to them. Its like different enough to appreciate that its different while also familiar enough to understand what its saying.

https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/woqaku/the_fully_s...

My wife kindly got me two books of his art for Christmas last year. They took forever to arrive from Japan but very much worth the weight. The aesthetic is a very particular view of the 1980s that was also reflected in TV shows like Miami Vice, and the choice of palette is very … Amiga. I wonder if the designers of that computer and its Workbench desktop environment were influenced by his use of colour.

Hah! If you want to step into a Hiroshi Nagai painting as a 3D world, that's basically what happens in my Ambient Garden project. In fact I was surprised that nobody ever pointed it out despite all the visitors: https://ambient.garden/

Editing to respond to multiple replies: Yes, he's painted a series of landscapes with that specific pointillism technique. The best I could find is a pretty random link, but it might be the most relevant painting: https://fortinbrah.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/...

I discovered city-pop through vaporwave genre. Initially, I thought these stylish Japanese album covers were contemporary and inspired by vaporwave - turns out it was the other way around! The original 80s city-pop aesthetic actually influenced vaporwave's visual style decades later.

Here is the artist’s website http://www.hiroshinagai.com/contents.html

A lot of Tetsuro Yamashita's album covers use this illustration style: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=RDEMliH6yv_-S5Z3VNUdGlcyfA...

Apart from the visual aesthetic, english lyrics and music genre are also a big sign of American influence.

Imagine seeing Hiroshi Nagai on HN! He's one of my favorite artists. As far as I know, his son sells prints out of various locations in Tokyo, and keeps hopping around. It takes some effort to find him but when you do, the prints are not too expensive. I like to imagine it's a "show us you really want this art" thing, but not in terms of money.

If you haven't heard of the musical genre before, here's a decent example:

Eiichi Ohtaki - A Long Vacation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5Ox44_7puU

Won best album of 1981 per the Japan Record Awards.

Nagai’s work is really interesting for the feeling it produces. I first came across it on subreddits dedicated to imagery of liminal spaces[0], which several of his pieces can be classified as.

Some of Edward Hopper’s pieces give off similar vibes despite coming from an entirely different era and background.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminal_space_(aesthetic)

Hiroshi Nagai is the first time I felt art resonate with me

All of a sudden I appreciated art!

Very reminiscent of 90s video game city sceneries. Car and motorcycle racing games come to mind.

Nagai's work seems to have been an inspiration for the late 1980's/early 90's Sega aesthetic (OutRun, Sonic, etc.)

Maybe they call it 1950s, but to me this oozes late 80's video games.

Sierra.

Interesting, a Japanese view of old America. I think I can see a bit of Japanese influence in the paintings. I think the paintings are quite good and end up being nostalgic.

These are great pictures. I'd love to see a sequel to the old arcade game Out Run done in this style.

Beautiful. This reminds me of the artwork in games like Streets of Rage. Something about the 80s and early 90s vibe washes over these artworks.

Very interesting blog overall, loved the mud entities festival and the baby crying competition

Somewhat similar to EGA graphics

Oh nice I have seen a lot of these in future funk songs as song covers

City pop I think too

Now I know where Poolsuite came from: https://poolsuite.net

Warning: sound

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