The Surfers Journal
Light / Dark
The waves were perfect. A sleepy haze hung over the sea surface, brimming with warm, radiant sunlight and humming with the sweep of the swell. The previous night, following a long day exhibiting at Greenroom Festival in Yokohama, we clanked beers and slurped up ramen after the bars had closed. The noodle house was dank and crowded, washed in yellow light, and it seemed like everyone was shouting out orders for more beers, shouting to each other across the tables, raucous, teetering. Later, I staggered onto my hotel bed and the room spun.
I hadn’t slept in days. Japanese insomnia. I watched an old man eat ancient cheeses and other fetid items, apparently with glee, at four in the morning on TV in my hotel. The programming showed 1,000 chicken feet boiling in a Plexiglas vat. Then noodles under a microscope to help explain flour-absorption rates in broth. Turns out ramen noodles are uniquely capable of absorbing both the broth and the fat of the soup in a way that udon and soba noodles simply cannot.
The surf the next day was early. My eyes hurt. Sun glared through sea smoke, obscuring the reef farther out. We paddled by a small fishing port into deeper water, and waves came through like carpets unspooling at us from the clouds. The haze lifted further, and the session became epic.
After a long, long ride, George Cockle paddled past me, grinning like a squirrel. “Did you see Mount Fuji?” he asked, pointing casually over his left shoulder. My eyes drifted upward and through the haze and mist. The mountain’s summit appeared like the dorsal fin of an immense and mystical creature, snowcapped into space. And there I was, sitting in the trough of the woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai, an image that nearly every surfer has admired. I felt so thoroughly joyful, so overwhelmed with ecstatic energy, that I partially died right there on the spot.
All of this—the festival where I showed my artwork, the extraordinary meals we enjoyed, the camaraderie of surfers in a tiny port next to a world-class wave, the sights and sounds of Yokohama and Zushi and Kamakura—came to me thanks to the generosity of Yusuke Hanai, whose invitation I had accepted.
Hanai has been one of Japan’s most in-demand artists for several years now. His street-influenced, illustrative work has been a mainstay of hip branding in the country for a decade, helping raise the aesthetic profile of many of his corporate clients. He has collaborated often with Beams, the ultra-chic clothing brand and department store, whose taste-making styles beat from the heart of Harajuku. His drawings have appeared on countless T-shirts and hoodies, jackets, socks and sneakers, towels, trunks, and coolers. He’s worked with Gravis and Vans, Patagonia, Levi’s, and even Fender Musical Instruments, which branded two collectible electric guitars with his work.
Surveying a broad range of Hanai’s corporate collaborations, his style and messaging seems to be the quietly dominant partner. Everywhere are his trademark sad-sack countenances, everywhere is the call to awareness—of group action, for collaboration, change, environmental activism. And yet the branding, the capitalist objective, is not maligned. There’s a wry wisdom at play here: Hanai is working with the powers that be to effect change, instead of against them.
He believes in people. That’s what I think.
His drawing style is hard to dislike, as he borrows freely from the aesthetics of 1960s Californian beatnik cartoons, particularly those penned by Rick Griffin. In fact, in some sense, Hanai may have added a few chapters to the late artist’s legacy in the creation of his own early work, much of it about surfing. A version of Griffin’s greatest gift to surf culture, Murphy the perennial grom, makes appearances in many of Hanai’s first surfy paintings. But the Japanese artist’s interest in US-made culture and counterculture runs deep.
Hanai spent considerable time in San Francisco studying art in class and on the streets when the Mission School (the ’90s and early-aughts group of high-minded and high-talent graffiti artists like Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Chris Johanson, Clare Rojas, and Ruby Neri) was flourishing. It’s no accident, then, that his drawing style borrows from the Haight-Ashbury gene pool circa ’69, with hints of McGee sprinkled atop. In fact, McGee and Kilgallen in particular seem to be guiding lights for Hanai, as all three artists’ figurative work imbues a cartoonish aesthetic with the pathos of the disenfranchised and the aspirational potential of the individual.
More recently, Hanai has become increasingly visible in the contemporary art scene, selling out gallery shows in minutes, while remaining a beloved graphic artist to the hip clothiers of Japan. His gallery exhibitions often consist of large-scale paintings on canvas and mixed-media installations done at human scale: a thatch-roof hut, for example, populated with life-size, toy-like sculptures adapted from his figure drawings. This particular output comes from his collaborations with toy manufacturers in Japan that produce collectible figurines of his designs.
Like the sculptures, his large pictures are essentially scaled-up versions of his drawings. They can be a little dour in their frank absence of theatrics. The paintings are usually colored in cool, flat tones, and, just like the drawings, the images remain modest and understated. They read as vignettes without context. His characters are often sad or troubled, frowning and bent, apparently weighted down by existential burden. Many are seated and alone.
Hanai has stated that these are not lost souls and that his work is not morose. Rather, he strives to achieve something closer to accuracy and frankness. In life, he has said, people do not roam the streets smiling broadly, but that does not mean that they are lost or bereft. Rather, Hanai takes a decidedly humanist point of view, asking his viewers to believe in the potential of a life in flux. As all lives are. No one is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes.
In Untitled, 2023, a man bends over his child, but has neither of his hands available to assist the little one, since one is tucked firmly into his own pocket and the other is busy clutching a beer. Hanai is showing that we are a faulty species and that idealism is not his vocation.
Hanai confesses that he draws what he sees all around him—everyday stuff, friends and family, pets. He often adds small ephemera that nod to a distinctly contemporary reality. Litter shows up, often. His landscapes can seem mildly blighted by the entanglements of progress. His scenes look a little constrained, and in this he shares an optic associated with the output of late-nineteenth-century Parisian painters Édouard Manet and Georges Seurat, whose work, it has been argued, was the first to present audiences with a mirror to their own modern life, enabled and restricted by urbanism.
Fall seven times, get up eight. Facing the current. These are themes and titles that run deep in the work of the artist. The boxing phrase “down but not out” is precisely where Hanai positions many of his characters. It is the potential change that can come from getting to your feet that eighth time that interests him. We all face the current in metaphorical terms, every day as we navigate a life. How we manage to work with and against the flow interests Hanai, and he hints repeatedly that the odds are great against us, that the forces of challenge are ubiquitous, and that successes are earned. His work is an appeal to our collective sympathies and failures—our capacity to help one another and recognize, in each other, our very own struggles.
Hanai has found a way to balance both his narrative and his compositional logic in works like Seize the Light, 2022, where a group of figures crowds the base of an imposing, vertically oriented canvas. The figures reach upward, fingers tense with yearning toward the heavens. Above their hands and about their shoulders, various thought bubbles hover. There are no words at all, in any of the bubbles, but each leads to a different figure. To them all, something is just out of reach. Their ideas, while different from each other, are commingling in a fascinating way. Each thought bubble has its own distinct coloring, and, by organizing the picture this way, Hanai is illustrating the varying, individual concerns of the group.
Where things get psychologically interesting is in Hanai’s arrangement of the thought bubbles themselves. Rather than stacking them in layers, where one would be at the bottom, several in the middle, and one at the obvious top (dominant to the rest), they are allowed to overlap transparently, making them all exist in the same layer.
Hanai is brilliant here: By dissolving a spatial hierarchy in the picture, he is making for an egalitarian paean where different types of peoples, with different types of aspirations, are made equal. In their hopes and dreams, there is no echelon, no order of importance. Everyone’s dreams have equal merit. He manifests this concept by coloring each figure’s thought bubble its own specific color, but when that bubble overlaps another, he blends their two colors together, making a third, shared tone.
The top portion of the canvas, meanwhile, where the matrix of these thought bubbles coalesces, also creates an attractive pictorial geometry. It smacks of the modernist abstraction found in Roy Lichtenstein’s late work, but conceptually goes the extra mile: As the viewer’s eye moves up the canvas, the painting itself moves from the visual logic of figures reaching, to the broader, abstracted complexity of social yearning mixing in the spaces above them, where thoughts, without words, to heaven go.
Indeed, collective action is something of a primary concern to the artist. Throwing Stones is the title of a life-size sculpture the artist exhibited at T&Y Gallery, Los Angeles, in the summer of 2023 alongside McGee and Herbie Fletcher. The sculpture is a figure made of colorful PVC plastic, exactly like a leveled-up toy figurine. This work, however, is on an entirely different scale, and its gravitas occupies real space, showing a seated figure, knees up and with an arm outstretched, suggesting that a stone has just been released into the air like a melancholy pitch into an unseen pond.
Walking around the piece reveals that the figure is frowning, as many of Hanai’s characters are, but the reasons for his grimace are not entirely clear. It remains ambiguous if the stone’s throw is in defeat, regret, frustration, or nihilism.
In discussing the piece, Hanai told me his intent was to suggest that while the small acts of a single person may seem insignificant, when repeated, either by the individual or by the community, things begin to add up and act as a nucleus of change. And so, in Throwing Stones, we are present at the moment of great potential.
Many of Hanai’s figures are just about to do something. Or something is just about to happen. Figures that seem bent or weighted down, sedentary in defeat, are actually just about to blossom, to begin their movement forward into something resembling prosperity, hope, improvement, destiny. The spark of change itself is not portrayed, but the gathering electricity is beginning to manifest. It’s a stretch (pun acknowledged) to imply that the fingers of the stone-throwing figure are meant to remind us of Adam’s hand unfurling toward the mighty hand of God himself, in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel masterpiece, but the concept of Genesis is shared by both works.
The depiction of hands is essential to reading Hanai’s work. So are cats. Cats show up all over the place, reminding the viewer of the mythical protective benevolence of maneki-neko (the “waving cat” so prevalent in Japanese culture). Hanai’s cats also suggest that humans, as a species, need some help, and that’s where the hands come in too.
We’ll find groups of figures reaching toward something or assisting one another with their hands, the touch symbolizing support, unity. Fingers selfishly clasped around beers, contrasted by hands languidly splayed open to provide a perch for an intelligent bird (We Will Fly Again, 2021).
He has an octopus that pops up in various pictures and sculptural installations—a creature with eight arms and an acute sentience throughout each one of them. What potential! The outstretched hand, the probing tentacle, the yearn to touch, to connect, to help. This is the image of social need and community.
Hanai has quietly indicated in his work that the world is awash in serious challenges, both macro- and microscopic. Together, we can face the current, make change, work together. The accumulation of many small gestures of grace and kindness will amount to the grand acts the world needs. One person’s struggle is also a community’s struggle is also an entire planet’s.
That night in Yokohama, exhausted and dizzy, belly full of beer and ramen, I was blissed out, faded, and nearly asleep on my feet. The rumor of a building swell fizzled from my mind. Hanai guided me to my hotel, got me checked in. Then he contacted all of the locals at his tightly regulated spot and asked them for permission to bring his American friend surfing the next morning.
[Feature Image Caption: THROWING STONES & SURF SHACK, 2023, plastic sculptures, wooden shed, plastic beach trash, driftwood collected by Herbie Fletcher, vintage boards from Barry McGee. Photo courtesy of T&Y Projects]
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