Toshio Saeki- Legendary Erotic Artist of the Tokyo Underground.
- PleaseKnock
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Toshio Saeki 佐伯俊男 (1945 - 2019) was a Japanese illustrator and painter. Dubbed the 'Godfather of Japanese Erotica', his witty illustrations blended Japanese folktales with gore, talent, eroticism and a drive to puncture taboos. A revered artist of Japan’s postwar underground, Saeki built an enthusiastic and loyal cult following people looking to escape Japanese cultural restraint. A prolific artist whose work appeared in 21 monographs and many magazines, Saeki's art is now highly-prized.
"I’m more concerned with reality, which as we all know is stranger than fiction.” Toshio Saeki
Born in Japan’s Miyazaki prefecture, his formative years were spent in Osaka before a move to Tokyo in 1969. He enjoyed Western art and was notably influenced by Jean-Thomas "Tomi" Ungerer (1931 – 2019), the Alsatian storyteller famed for his satires against the Vietnam War and animal cruelty, imaginative children's books and erotic art. In reaction to criticism of his drawing of German prostitutes as being exaggerated and brutally fanciful, Saeki said: “I’m more concerned with reality, which as we all know is stranger than fiction.” Truth cuts deep. He said his "greatest compliment" came from a woman who said his work "made her vomit”.
Saeki also wanted to reflect life's bald truths. “When I was working in the advertising field in Osaka, I encountered the works by Ungerer," Saeki recalled. "I felt something poisonous in his works and learned that beauty without poison is boring.” Your love life might be toxic, but at least it isn't dull. “Toshio Saeki conjures death with a pen,” wrote the late Japanese critic, poet and playwright Shūji Terayama in a letter to the artist in 1969.
In Tokyo, Saeki was published regularly in Japanese magazines, including the influential weekly magazine Heibon Punch aimed at tenge boys, which covered fashion, cars sex and and more, selling over a million copies an issue.
In 1970 he self-published 50 drawings in the book Toshio SAEKI art book. It was a critical success, and later that year Saeki was given a solo show in Paris. Commissions followed. You might have noticed his work on the cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1972 album Sometime in New York City. That illustration depicts a knife-wielding devil figure attacking a young woman dressed in a sailor school uniform.
His 1972 work Akai Hako (The Red Box), a signed portfolio with 50 color letterpress prints on Japan paper and 1 color screenprint on cloth, sold at auction in 2016 for more than double its estimated price, at $3750.
Affected by childhood nightmares, 'Ginei' and Yakuza-B movies, the paranormal, Western comics, jidaigeki samurai films, customs and costumes, brutal Japanese knives, tragic Japanese history, pain, and dreamy ukiyo-e, Saeki's work is melange of everything he's ever seen and felt.
With a mind full of primary source material, Seaki's style was to wait for images to pop into his head before committing them to paper. “When I was a boy, I used to show my picture stories to my friends and read them out loud, and they seemed to enjoy it very much," he explained. "And that’s what I still do now.”
In one of his most recognisable pictures, a smiling woman slices off one of her breasts with one of those Japanese knives as a grown man suckles the disembodied nipple. Is that sort of thing par for the course in the bizarre goings on that constitute the history of Japan? Are you amused, turned on or repulsed by the image? Saeki isn't overly concerned with reality and trying to put things into words. This is visual art masquerading as possibility. If you think it's going on, who's to say that it isn't?
Life poured into Saeki's head. It emerged as alluring, unsettling erotic art. And he wanted you to see your own life in his work, picking up wisps of forgotten memory in his pictures, those mysteries, confusions and stirrings of youth before age looked for solidity and suppressed the strange. Saeki wants you to see his work and remember how lively your mind once was. What inspired him were "feelings of fear, uncertainty, anxiety or happiness" he felt as a child and in his adolescence.
"Let me put it this way," Saeki explained in a 2013 interview, "leave other people to draw seemingly beautiful flowers that bloom within a nice, pleasant-looking scenery. I try instead to capture the vivid flowers that sometimes hide and sometimes grow within a shameless, immoral and horrifying dream."
“When I was a boy, I used to show my picture stories to my friends and read them out loud, and they seemed to enjoy it very much. And that’s what I still do now.” - Toshio Saeki
When Toshio died in 2019, news of his death was not released publicly until January 16 by his representative gallery Nanzuka Underground via Instagram. We can only hope that now after his death, his art will gain context and become accepted as modern contemporary art.
"Considered as contemporary Shunga (erotic art), or Yokaiga (ghost and monster art), the work cleverly mixes eroticism and provocative elements along with black humor, aiming to unveil various sexual taboos within conservative Japanese social society." - JUXTAPOZ
“I don’t think I could draw these scenes, if I was really into it myself, I have to be distanced from it to be able to draw it in this way.” - Toshio Saeki
"The humour in my work is not intentional. I never realised that aspect existed within it, until someone pointed it out to me." - Toshio Saeki
“The visions that I show people are the incomprehensible stuff of ero [erotica] and mystery. If the reality hidden in my soul—even if it is only the smallest fragment of it—is able to evoke something in the viewer, then my intention has been achieved.” - Toshio Saeki
“The films that my mother took me to as a child left a deep impression on me, and scenes from the films appear often in my work.” - Toshio Saeki
