Hajime Sorayama dares to ask the questions everyone is too afraid to know the answers to, like: ‘what if there was a sexy robot at the Hindenburg Disaster’ and ‘what if Marilyn Monroe was a sexy robot?’ and ‘what if mermaids were sexy robots?’ and ‘what if Joan of Arc was a sexy robot, but with a genital piercing?’ You’ve always wanted to know, admit it, and now the answers are all right here.
The Japanese illustrator has been melding photography with digital printing and painting techniques for decades, creating a collection of instantly recognisable ‘gynoid’ female robots with perfect metal carapaces, pouting cyborg lips and ample robo-bosoms. There’s a sculpture of one of his golden gynoids in the middle of the gallery, reaching for the stars and launching herself into a future of unbound horniness, but the rest of the show is made up of works on canvas. There’s Joan of Arc, Marilyn Monroe, that mermaid, but also a ludicrously sexual Cleopatra and a naked zebra-woman hybrid. Soft, plump flesh is housed in curving, gleaming metal, the tenderness of the female body collides with the harsh reality of steel in slack-jawed worship of perfect future pin-ups. It’s almost painfully randy, throbbing with ridiculous sci fi turgidity.
Throbbing with ridiculous sci fi turgidity
You can read a lot into this, if you want. These robots are gods to Sorayama, idols to be worshipped. But are they also a warning about the future of human-cyborg relations? The gallery argues that Sorayama’s work questions ‘the history of the male gaze’ and ‘the post-human woman as an object of fear and desire’.
But even though some complex concepts of hybridity and trans-humanism lurk in the work, to see it as an expression of those ideas is to weigh it down with a theoretical tedium it neither merits nor benefits from. Sorayama’s art succeeds because it’s exactly what it looks like: sexy robots. It’s futuristic erotica, it’s technological obscenity, it’s android arousal.
The real shock is seeing it in a major art gallery, the kind of place that’s usually so deeply earnest about the work it shows. It feels out of place, wrong.
Is the art good? I don’t know, what’s good these days? Dense, complicated art about liminality and surface and decolonial intertextuality? Art about art? Art about art about art?
This is none of those things. It’s just sexy robots, and in its own lewd way it’s kind of brilliant.