Japanese artistic depictions of America have an interesting way of having an "accent" so to speak but in a manner that doesn't mistranslate but rather adds something unique to it. I'm reminded of a series of illustrations from the 1800s explaining the American revolution for a Japanese audience where all the depictions of the important historical characters look like traditional samurai drawings and they take on a sort of mythological character to them. Its like different enough to appreciate that its different while also familiar enough to understand what its saying.

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My wife kindly got me two books of his art for Christmas last year. They took forever to arrive from Japan but very much worth the weight. The aesthetic is a very particular view of the 1980s that was also reflected in TV shows like Miami Vice, and the choice of palette is very … Amiga. I wonder if the designers of that computer and its Workbench desktop environment were influenced by his use of colour.

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Hah! If you want to step into a Hiroshi Nagai painting as a 3D world, that's basically what happens in my Ambient Garden project. In fact I was surprised that nobody ever pointed it out despite all the visitors: https://ambient.garden/

Editing to respond to multiple replies: Yes, he's painted a series of landscapes with that specific pointillism technique. The best I could find is a pretty random link, but it might be the most relevant painting: https://fortinbrah.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/...

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I discovered city-pop through vaporwave genre. Initially, I thought these stylish Japanese album covers were contemporary and inspired by vaporwave - turns out it was the other way around! The original 80s city-pop aesthetic actually influenced vaporwave's visual style decades later.

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Here is the artist’s website http://www.hiroshinagai.com/contents.html

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