My first encounter with Hiroshi Nagai’s art goes back to the 1980s, although at the time I didn’t really know who the artist was. It was the album cover of September Wind by Japanese jazz musician Naoya Matsuoka that first caught my attention — that striking blue, the swimming pool, and the bold colours that somehow captured the feeling of the era.
Over the years, I came across more of Nagai’s work and gradually began to recognise his unmistakable style. Deep blue pools, palm trees, clear skies and colourful architecture — often without a single person in sight. His images became closely associated with Japan’s City Pop culture of the 1980s, yet much of their inspiration came from the California landscapes and architecture he encountered during a road trip across the United States in 1973.
So seeing Hiroshi Nagai: Summer Dreaming, his first solo exhibition in Thailand, was particularly interesting for me. It was also my first opportunity to see a good collection of his work together rather than simply encountering individual images and album covers.
Looking at them again after all these years, the colours still feel just as bold and distinctive. For me, they are also a small visual journey back to the 1980s — beginning with that blue album cover I first noticed many years ago.
