Career
His work is notable for superb technical skills, elaborate fantastic settings (occasionally reminiscent of William Blake), and for incorporating Japanese, Indian, South-East Asian and African mythology. Aside from a few, intermittent appearances in gay magazines, Hasegawa Sadao"s monograph Paradise Vision (1996 Kochi Studio) has been the only introduction of this talented artist in Japan. Gaining much attention overseas, with publications in the United Kingdom and numerous contributions to magazines in the United States and Europe, Hasegawa"s works have not been done justice in his home country.
With great influences from Edo-Period shunga (erotic art), his obsession and display of beauty in the male body and sex combined with Asian motifs result in a truly concentrated representation of eroticism.
Hasegawa was born in the Tōkai area of Japan in the 1950s. Travels to India during his 20"s and starts to take up drawing on his own.
In 1990 he published "Sadao Hasegawa" from G.M.P Company England. One of his most celebrated work, the "Paradise Vision" was published by Kochi Studio in 1996.
He ended his life by committing suicide on November 20, 1999 in Bangkok, Thailand.
In 2000 Naruyama Gallery exhibited his last works "Linga", due to the request of the Sadao"s family, who found a will requesting his posthumous exhibition written by Sadao before his death. These works would come to be exhibited at a memorial exhibition, along with a final series of starkly disembodied and erect phalluses unlike anything else Hasegawa ever created. According to Toshie Urabe, who spoke with Hasegawa"s brother, the only clues left at the scene of his death were a small piece of rope (he had asphixiated himself using rope tied around a door knob) and a small stone on which he had painted a portrait of Yukio Mishima (Hasegawa"s death preceded the anniversary of Mishima"s own suicide).