Metallic Skin 空山基与他的全金属机械姬

With their metallic skin, Hajime Sorayama‘s hyperrealistic gynoids have earned their place in the 20th-century pop icon hall of fame. They’ve appeared in advertising campaigns, fashion shows, and album covers. The most notable example of the latter is Aerosmith’s Just Push Play, in which a Sorayama gynoid mimics Marilyn Monroe’s subway scene with the wind blowing her dress from below.

Sorayama is an influential figure in the development of notions of futurism and mechanical aesthetics. He was one of the first to inaugurate the idea of a robot as a sensual being. Still, Sorayama holds his characters in much more affectionate esteem than erotic or utilitarian. “They are not sex machines,” he says, categorically. He’s in no way objectifying women.

His gynoids are full-grown and full-figured women, and he emphasizes their femininity using the cliches of a sexy female figure. They’re all tall and slender, with hourglass-shaped bodies, perfect teardrop breasts, curvy hips, and long, beautiful legs. He depicts their anatomy with impressive exactitude, a striking effect when juxtaposed with the mechanical characteristics they bear—rivets, joints, bolts, air vents, and a brilliant metallic outer coating.

Other robotic features also appear, such as visor eyes, antenna ears, and serial numbers. Sometimes they bear cryptic messages debossed in their bodies, such as “platinum dream,” “cyber discipline,” “corruptrix,” and “we all got screwed!” The gynoid who bears the latter is pleasing herself with a screw, literally. Sorayama also includes a trademark symbol, his iconic logo, and the manufacturing year in all of them, invariably.

His gynoids seldom wear clothes. Most of the time, they are entirely naked. And even though they are objects, they don’t look objectified. Instead, they appear confident as if they were the ones in control—in control of their sexuality and of whoever or whatever crosses their way. They’re undeniably sensual, and their attitude is as sexy as it is inspiring. “Female fans have told me they want to look like my work when they become robots in the future. That makes me happy,” Sorayama says.

Born in 1947 in Imabari, Sorayama grew up in post-war Japan, a time of nationwide transformation and growing American influence. He began drawing pinup-style women in high school, inspired by the risqué photographs he saw in Playboy. In 1965, he enrolled at Shikoku Gakuin University to study English literature and Ancient Greek. There, he published an illustration magazine titled Pink Journal. But the publication wasn’t well-received by the faculty and students due to its highly sexual content. Not surprising, considering Shikoku Gakuin was a Christian university. While others were attending Mass in the campus’ chapel, Sorayama was pasting erotic art on the walls. It was a matter of time until he got kicked out.

Sorayama then transferred to Tokyo’s Chuo Bijutsu Gakuen to study art, where he graduated in 1969 and landed a job in advertising. “When I started working, I remembered I had been praised for my drawings when I was a child,” he says. “Since I wasn’t good at anything else, I became an illustrator. I admired Da Vinci and Hokusai at the time, but I drew what I liked, and the result is what I am today.”

In the late 1970s, with an established reputation as a freelance illustrator, a friend asked him to draw a poster for Suntory Whisky. The original idea was for the ad to feature C-3PO, the golden humanoid robot from Star Wars. But facing copyright issues and running on a tight deadline, his friend asked Sorayama to design a replacement. Sorayama’s solution wound up being his first-ever robot artwork, which was a genderless droid with arms and legs as skinny as toothpicks and shiny platinum skin. Inspired by the project, he expanded on the idea and drew a mechanical woman next. “It was the first sexy robot I drew,” he says. His gynoid was born.

In 1983, Sorayama published Sexy Robot, a book compiling his sensual robot drawings up until then. It was an instant hit. They appeared in a clear pinup style, striking poses that accentuated their bodies, like sitting on their knees, fixing their hair with both hands up, or lying on their backs with legs up in the air. It was all very suggestive, and it contrasted with their silvery-white and seemingly cold skin. Such a novelty fascinated the public, and Sorayama quickly became a cult hero.

Pin-Up, a second book, came right after, this time depicting real women with elements of fetishism such as latex and leather. Not long after, he was invited to illustrate the pages of the very magazines he was inspired by—Playboy and Penthouse. In general, Sorayama also borrows from mythical or fictional icons such as Wonder Woman or the goddess Venus. He also draws human-robot hybrids. But through it all, he maintains his signature hyper-realistic pinup style.

It’s only reasonable to assume that Sorayama would have faced some form of backlash from specific demographics for the salacious nature of his work, especially in Japan, where society can be notably conservative. “Not once,” he denies it. “I never thought of eroticism as a bad thing, and I think that the people who look at my pictures understand exactly what I mean.”

Women were at the very heart of robot depictions. One of the first robots to appear in science fiction—and perhaps the most influential until today—was Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Maria has a similar appearance to Sorayama’s robots with her metallic armor, shapely hips, and prominent breasts. However, she’s stiff, walking with no fluid motion or showing emotions on her face. Even if she’s not meant to be sexual, Maria was born from her mad creator’s infatuation with an ex-lover and was supposed to take in her personality and figure.

Another influential robot to appear in science fiction was the HAL 9000 computer from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). HAL does not resemble a human being in any physical way—he’s merely a fisheye lens with a red dot at its center, more akin to the eye of hell. But he’s human-like in his soothing male voice and his sentience. And that’s the most chilling part. In one of the most memorable scenes, HAL turns on his creators to save himself from being disconnected and to prevent the abortion of his mission.

In such a way, Kubrick inaugurates our underlying fear of artificial intelligence and the notion that machines could also be capable of powerful emotions. 2001 is a film renowned for its artistic and technical excellence, realism, and immersive quality that influenced everything that ensued in science fiction, including George Lucas’ Star Wars, released about a decade later.

Lucas, however, presents his robots, RDD2 and C-3PO, as much more sympathetic characters and as a comic relief duo in the plot. Interestingly, the design of C-3PO was largely inspired by Metropolis‘ Maria. Star Wars is also influenced by Japanese culture, notably Akira Kurosawa’s films and Samurai philosophy. Its plot is deeply ingrained with mythological motifs, and, as Lucas himself said, it tells an “old myth in a new way” dealing with contemporary issues. To him, precisely for this reason, the saga gained so much resonance.

Sorayama drew his first pin-up gynoids amidst and because of the Star Wars craze of the late 1970s, and he embedded them with the same mythical quality as the film. Admittedly, the traces of fetishism he embeds in his drawings are less of a sexual nature than they are a way of idealizing women. His characters exude powerful femininity, and appear as unattainable goddesses, liberated from patriarchy. And that’s the impression he has of pin-ups from a young age, anyway. “(…) In our day, these pin-ups were like goddesses,” Sorayama said in a 2012 interview. “I guess I could describe it as my own goddess cult.”

Sorayama also sees a woman’s birth-giving capacity as a force to be reckoned with. “All humans are born from a woman and grow up breastfeeding. That’s why all men are mama’s boys,” he jokes. But then he adds in a more serious tone that women “are the source of life and the creators.” He expressed this fascination in the way he depicts the anatomy of the female body, with large hips, tender breasts—perfectly sketched to conceive and nurture a child.

In a recent solo show at HOW Museum in Shanghai, Sorayama presented several of his pieces since he began drawing robots in the 1970s. The exhibition’s title, “Metropolis,” was a tribute to the homonymous film and Maria, who can be seen as a grandmother of sorts to his own character. In a piece from 2017, Sorayama gives the name of Maria to his gynoid and places her against one of Metropolis’ most famous plate shots, the vertigo-inducing cityscape intersected by roadway systems and airplanes, dominated by Lang’s new tower of Babel.

A highlight of the show was the collection of recently constructed life-size sculptures made of materials such as fiberglass, aluminum, and iron. Not constrained by the properties of the materials, Sorayama transferred the curvaceous and seemingly flexible characteristics of his gynoids into their 3D form seamlessly, bringing his vision to life as a tangible replica of his drawings. The way light and reflections play with their metallic surface is also remarkably similar to his illustrations, emphasizing his mastery of realism.

The display also included a large T-Rex sculpture and a variety of drawings of dinosaurs with the same robotic appearance as his women. When asked before why he likes dinosaurs, Sorayama merely laughed and replied in his typical humor, “I don’t know, I just do.” It’s all ambiguous, but dinosaurs are always associated with the past, and when juxtaposed with the advanced technology of robots, they could signify the confluence of two extremes—past and future.

The most striking part of the exhibition was the recreation of the hotel room in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where some of Sorayama’s sculptures were shown, including his homage to Maria. The playful parallel with one of the most cryptic movies in cinema history highlights the same quality in Sorayama’s oeuvre. It also provides an immersive spectacle of what defined visions of the future in the 1970s and 80s, a formative period for his growth as an artist.

In the late 1980s, Sorayama drew a gynoid to star in the Japanese animated film The Humanoid (1986), and it caught the eye of Hollywood producers. In the 1990s, he consulted and collaborated with Western sci-fi blockbusters such as Timecop and Space Truckers. It was an extraordinary time for the genre. The evolution of computer graphics and special-effects technology made new ideas possible. Fast forward to 2013, George Lucas himself reached out to Sorayama for a contribution to the book Star Wars Concept. Sorayama drew a hyper-sexualized robot called Betty Droid, later included in the television animated series Clone Wars.

But his work in Hollywood hasn’t dampened his criticisms of the film industry. “Movies have indeed become a gigantic industry, and the benefits of this are that we have made great science fiction movies,” he says. “But I think there are also many negative effects, such as the worshipping of money.” Sorayama is also unsure about the future of the sci-fi genre once technology completely dominates our lives outside fiction. “Science-fiction movies were attractive when futuristic technology was still far away, but I don’t know if it will remain this way in the future.”

Sorayama has also been responsible for bringing futuristic technology into the real world. In 1998, Toshitada Doi, the head of Sony’s Digital Creatures Lab, invited him to design the appearance of the first consumer model of Aibo, the world’s first AI robot-dog. Sony had been experimenting with animal robots for quite some time by then, but they couldn’t get the visual design right until Sorayama came in. “I drew a rough design and showed it to Mr. Doi, and he used it at once,” Sorayama remembers.

Even in its first generation, Aibo was a remarkable robot able to interact with its environment and learn. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, it represented a vision of what was to come. People imagined a future with robot pets at home, where they didn’t have to worry about feeding them or picking up poo. It didn’t happen, or at least it didn’t go mainstream. But that’s not to say the concept failed. The fourth-generation model was released in Japan in 2018, almost twenty years after the first model. Aibo captivated his niche, and what’s exceptional is that its owners truly bond with it. They name it, pat it, and even miss it when they’re apart. Even though it’s a machine, Aibo drives genuine emotions and smiles.

Japan is known for being a robot-loving country. Besides Aibo, the country was the birthplace of many other world-famous robots. Some say it’s because the cultural acceptance of robots in Japan is higher than anywhere else in the world. While in the West, for instance, robots were seen only as machines, in Japan, they were first defined as controllable artificial humans. They’ve also been present in the country’s popular culture for a long time, as we can see with Astro Boy and many other likable robots that frequently appear in Japanese anime.

Nowadays, it’s common to find robots performing various services in day-to-day life in Japan, such as in office buildings, banks, and restaurants as security guards, receptionists, and even waitresses. There is even a robot hotel in Nagasaki, fully automated, even if more for gimmicky purposes than anything else. Robots are also commonly being used as companions in nursing homes to combat loneliness, and there was at least one incident of a Japanese man getting married to an AI holographic anime character. All this leads to a more positive attitude regarding robots, which diverts from the notion that they are here to take over humans.

But, at least for humanoid robots, Sorayama thinks there’s still a long way to go, and he says that based on his observations during a recent visit to a robot factory. “They still can’t walk gracefully on two legs or move with delicate movements as humans do,” he says, and he realizes the task is complex. “Humans are miraculous creatures, made of highly complex mechanisms.”

Interestingly, despite his gynoids’ goddess-like characteristics and high-tech appearance, Sorayama simultaneously and paradoxically thinks of them as humans. The technological element appears less meaningful to him, more a result of an aesthetic preference than an essential quality. “My work takes a life form based on my aesthetic sense,” he says. “You can think of [the gynoids] as human beings with metallic skin. That’s why they have sexual desires and other physiological needs.”

Even in his creative process, his interest in the evolution of technology remains on an aesthetic level. “Even though tools have become more convenient, my creative process in itself hasn’t changed,” he says. In his studio, cluttered with many references, memorabilia, studies, and, naturally, erotic art, Sorayama uses the same manual methods he used when he began drawing. Together with Harumi Yamaguchi, he’s regarded as a master of the airbrush technique, employing it for soft gradients. And he works with two different erasers to create his characteristics glows, highlights, and reflections. An untrained eye could easily mistake such effects for digital work.

Still, Sorayama is not oblivious to the advancements of technology in the domain of art. He recently ventured into the metaverse with NFT art of his own, reproducing a pair of animated robot-sharks taken out of his Aquatic series. He offered them to the public at affordable prices to make them accessible and, in a way, challenge the speculative bubble that ensued with the rise of NFTs. At heart, he’s not looking for a quick cash grab, unlike many artists who are charging exorbitant prices for their NFT work. “I aim for my work to be an inscription of a perpetual futuristic history,” he says.

It’s indeed as a piece of futuristic history that Sorayama’s gynoids live in our collective consciousness. Their retrofuturistic allure throws us back to a future that never was. And yet, a closer look reveals they’re still connected to the world of now. Blurring the lines between humans and machines, they shed light on our complicated relationship with technology and bend our notions of desire, sex, and gender. When asked about his thoughts on the future, Sorayama’s usual irreverence comes into play. “I don’t know. Maybe a woman will take over the world, and all men will be slaves. It’s already like that in my house,” he laughs.

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Website: www.sorayama.jp
Instagram: @hajimesorayamaofficial

Contributors: Tomas Pinheiro, Lucas Tinoco
Chinese Translation: Olivia Li
Images Courtesy of Hajime Sorayama, NANZUKA, & HOW Museum