Hajime Sorayama’s Robots and the Cultural Memory of the Machine Age

As digital systems and artificial intelligence reshape daily life, the images through which societies imagine technology carry increasing weight. The art of Hajime Sorayama has long occupied this territory, examining how machines reflect human values, fantasies and fears. His work, spanning illustration, sculpture and immersive environments, offers a lens on how modern culture has learned to see itself through polished surfaces and mechanical bodies.

A large-scale retrospective opening at Creative Museum Tokyo traces Sorayama’s career from the late 1970s to the present, presenting his work not as a sequence of iconic images but as a sustained inquiry into light, reflection and transparency as cultural forces HS_CMT_press release_en. The exhibition arrives at a moment when the visual language Sorayama helped shape—hyper-polished surfaces, anthropomorphic machines, eroticised technology—has become ubiquitous, from product design to digital avatars.

Sorayama first gained attention in 1978 with a robot illustration produced for a whisky advertisement. What might have remained a commercial commission became the foundation of a lifelong project: the invention of a metallic body that was neither fully human nor fully mechanical. His “Sexy Robot” figures, rendered with obsessive technical precision, introduced a new aesthetic vocabulary in which chrome skin reflected not only light but desire itself.

Hajime Sorayama
Untitled
2025
Acrylic, digital print on canvas
H197 x W139.4 × D4 cm

During the 1980s, as Japan’s technological ambitions expanded and global popular culture embraced science fiction imagery, Sorayama’s work circulated widely beyond the art world. His illustrations appeared on album covers, in magazines and in advertising, quietly shaping a shared visual imagination. Unlike many artists who moved between art and commerce reluctantly, Sorayama treated the boundary as porous. The exhibition makes clear that this was not a compromise but a position: an insistence that visual culture, wherever it appears, participates in the formation of values.

Walking through the exhibition’s chronological arc, early drawings sit alongside later large-scale canvases and sculptural works. The evolution is not thematic so much as technical. Sorayama’s persistent concern has been how to depict light itself—how reflections bend, how surfaces dissolve, how transparency suggests depth without revealing substance. His machines appear flawless, yet they are never inert. Their polish implies movement, time and potential transformation.

Several installations translate this obsession into physical space. Mirrored environments multiply figures into infinite regressions, destabilising the viewer’s sense of orientation. Video works place robotic bodies into drifting cosmic landscapes, where scale and gravity lose their meaning. These experiences are less about spectacle than about perception: how easily the eye can be seduced, how quickly certainty dissolves when confronted with reflection.

Sorayama’s robots are often discussed in terms of sexuality, and the exhibition does not shy away from this aspect. Female-coded bodies, nude or semi-nude, recur throughout his work, their poses echoing classical sculpture as much as pin-up illustration. What emerges over time is not provocation for its own sake, but a sustained interrogation of how desire is constructed. By rendering bodies as machines, Sorayama exposes the mechanical logic that already governs ideals of beauty, symmetry and perfection.

At the same time, the retrospective complicates any simple reading of his work as futuristic fantasy. Alongside humanoid robots are metallic dinosaurs, sharks and unicorns—creatures drawn from myth, childhood memory and deep time. These figures suggest that Sorayama’s vision of the future is inseparable from nostalgia. Technology, in his work, does not replace history; it absorbs it, preserving old symbols in new skins.

The exhibition’s archival sections underline this continuity. Original drawings for Sony’s AIBO robot sit beside fashion collaborations and music-related projects, revealing how Sorayama’s imagery has moved fluidly across industries while retaining its core concerns. Rather than diluting his practice, these crossings have expanded its reach, embedding his visual language into everyday life.

Seen together, the works form a portrait of an artist less interested in prediction than in reflection. Sorayama does not tell viewers what the future will look like; he shows how we already imagine it. His mirrored surfaces return our gaze, asking what we project onto machines and why.

As societies grapple with accelerating technological change, Sorayama’s work gains renewed relevance. It reminds us that images do not merely illustrate progress; they shape the emotional and ethical frameworks through which progress is understood. In the gleam of polished metal, the exhibition suggests, we glimpse not only the future of machines, but the values we carry forward with them.