Hiroshi Nagai
None of it works without Nagai, who was painting swimming pools for Japanese soft-rock sleeves nearly four decades before the genre existed. He failed the entrance exam for art university and taught himself to paint while working as a television set decorator. A forty-day trip across the United States in 1973 settled the subject matter: deep blue skies, palm trees, and — from a swimming-pool-cleaner advertisement in House & Garden — the motif that defined his career. "This ad lead to my swimming pool paintings. I still got a lot of requests to paint them as they were so catchy."
That motif landed on Eiichi Ohtaki's A Long Vacation in 1981, the record that fixed city pop's visual identity and won a Golden Disc award. Deserted pools, empty coastal roads, glowing dusk skylines — all in acrylic and aerosol spray, by hand, never digitally, however digital they now look. More than fifty album covers followed, but it is this depopulated magic-hour register that resurfaced as vaporwave's core visual grammar, and his art anchored Light in the Attic's Pacific Breeze reissues, which fed the same revival.
In his late seventies he is unusually busy: a first French exhibition at Sato Gallery in Paris in 2025, then Tokyo, Bangkok and beyond through 2026, including a print show he attended to sign. On the new and much younger audience: "It is nice to see that I am not forgotten, that my old paintings are still in the minds of the young people and that they wanna collaborate with me."