Deep Summer Nostalgia: Dream Pool to Dead Pool

Anyone with even a bit of interest in city pop or vaporwave has probably seen Hiroshi Nagai’s artwork somewhere, even if they do not know his name. Placeless, abstract images of summer pools rendered in minimal light and shadow.

Born in 1947, Nagai grew up in a small city in rural Japan with an intense fascination with American culture. His family was not wealthy. He failed the entrance exams for every art school he applied to in Tokyo and went on to work building sets for television. He loved Black American music and taught himself to paint while spending his nights dancing at discos.

In 1973, he traveled around the United States for just forty days. Those forty days became a profound source of inspiration. During the 1980s, his strange longing for American culture was transformed in bubble-era Japan into symbolic images of summer: scenes that seemed to exist everywhere and nowhere at once. They became emblems of the consumerism of the time: abundance and emptiness. Stillness and deep nostalgia.

More recently, with the revival of city pop and the rise of vaporwave, these nostalgic pool paintings have become deeply iconic even to those of us who never experienced the bubble era.

Something we have been talking about lately is this:

“There is no point in recreating the dream pools of the 1980s. What we should be depicting now are the drained pools left among the ruins of the bubble.”

We call them “dead pools.” I plan to take a closer look at Nagai somewhere in our summer diary.