Untitled_Sexy Robot type II floating

HAJIME SORAYAMA (B. 1947)

Untitled_Sexy Robot type II floating

impressed 'SORAYAMA' (on figure's left thigh)

UV curable resin, plexiglass, silver plating, light-emitting diode, stainless steel, and steel

106 1/3 x 40 1/2 x 42 1/2 inches (270 x 103 x 108 cm)

Executed in 2022. This work is from an edition of 15.

PROVENANCE:

Almine Rech, Paris

Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2022

EXHIBITED:

Pairs, Almine Rech, Hajime Sorayama: CYBER LADIES' WORLD, 29 April-28 May, 2022.

NOTES:

Born in 1947 in Imabari, Japan, Hajime Sorayama lives and works in Tokyo. He is internationally renowned for his hyperreal depictions of futuristic female androids that fuse sensuality, fantasy, and technology. After studying art and design at Chuo University, Sorayama began his career in art as an illustrator, developing an airbrush technique that became his signature. His practice blurs the boundaries between fine art and industrial design, bridging the aesthetics of advertising, fashion, and science fiction. Over the last four decades, Sorayama’s work has been exhibited worldwide, including major presentations at Almine Rech in Paris and collaborations with global brands such as Dior and Sony. His celebrated “Sexy Robot” series, first conceived in the 1980s, has profoundly influenced contemporary visual culture, inspiring generations of artists, filmmakers, and designers through its provocative vision of the posthuman body.

Sorayama’s work stands at the intersection of eroticism and machinery, revealing how desire persists even within the polished surface of the artificial. His chrome skinned figures are at once seductive and mechanical, oscillating between the warmth of the human form and the cold perfection of engineered metal. While his imagery draws upon the visual language of Western pin ups, it also reflects a uniquely Japanese relationship to technology, one marked by fascination, intimacy, and ambivalence. The artist’s robots embody the paradox of a culture that reveres innovation while questioning its cost. Through his immaculate rendering and gleaming surfaces, Sorayama constructs a myth of beauty that is both idealized and self aware, where the line between flesh and fabrication disappears.

Untitled_Sexy Robot type II floating, executed in 2022, represents the culmination of Sorayama’s lifelong exploration of the erotic and the mechanical. Composed of resin, plexiglass, steel, and light, the figure hovers as if suspended between body and machine, its mirrored surface animated by a subtle inner glow. The work’s precision and luminosity transform the female cyborg into a contemporary icon of both allure and alienation. Within its polished skin, one senses the artist’s “addiction to the shine of metal,” a phrase he has used to describe his lifelong fascination with reflective surfaces. Here, sensuality becomes a language of transcendence, the human form reimagined through the lens of technological desire. Untitled_Sexy Robot type II floating is not simply a sculpture of the future but a meditation on the nature of beauty, autonomy, and fantasy in an age when humanity and machines have begun to verge on indistinguishable.