Hajime Sorayama

Sorayama's whole aesthetic traces back to a whisky ad. Born in 1947 in Ehime, Japan, he trained at Chuo Art School in Tokyo, graduated in 1969, and spent his early career in advertising before going freelance in 1972. In 1978 he painted his first chrome robot for a Suntory Whisky campaign. That single commercial illustration became the seed for everything he's known for now.

The breakthrough was the 1983 art book Sexy Robot, which took the airbrushed pin-up tradition he'd absorbed from Western artists like Alberto Vargas and fused it with hyper-realistic, mirror-polished robotic women, works he calls gynoids. The style was unlike anything else on shelves at the time: equal parts pin-up, sci-fi, and industrial design rendered with an almost obsessive technical precision.

Sorayama's reach goes well past art books and gallery walls. He designed Sony's original AIBO robot dog. He did the cover art for Aerosmith's 2001 album Just Push Play. He's collaborated with KAWS, been commissioned by Dior for a Pre-Fall runway sculpture, and holds work in the permanent collections of MoMA and the Smithsonian. Very few illustrators move that fluidly between commercial work, fine art, and pop music without losing what makes their style recognizable.

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