Toshio Saeki

Biography

In 1970, an exhibition of Saeki’s original drawings was held in Paris, at Gare Saint-Lazare. When it closed, all the works turned out to have been stolen.

He was born in 1945 in Miyazaki Prefecture and from the age of four grew up in Osaka. Little is known about his family or private life: he deliberately kept out of the public eye, believing that this left him freer and more provocative in his art. He began drawing as a teenager, making pictures of erotic scenes at the request of his school friends. He had no experience, so the scenes, comic and violent, had to be invented. From 1960 he studied in Kyoto in the Western painting department of the Kyoto Municipal Hiyoshigaoka High School art programme: oil painting, plaster work, graphic design. In 1963–1966 he worked as an advertising designer in Osaka. By one account, he then left the job for a long journey through Europe, the Soviet Union and the Middle East; by another, he moved to Tokyo hoping to become an illustrator for a publishing house. The sources give different years for the move: some say he settled in Tokyo in 1969, others right after 1966. As far as is known, he left Japan only once.

In 1970 his first book of drawings, “Saeki Toshio gashū”, appeared, followed in 1971 by a second, “Saeki Toshio sakuhin-shū”; his drawings were also printed in the magazine Heibon Punch. In his early pieces he took traditional Japanese patterns and built nightmarish friezes from them. For his third book, “Red Box” (Akai hako), the publisher Haga Shoten gave him a free hand. Saeki finished the drawings in two months, hiding with his wife in a hotel for couples: a stalker was following her everywhere. The book came out in 1972 and became his best-known work.

That same year, a drawing from it, a devil-like figure with a knife standing over a girl in school uniform, was put on the cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s album “Some Time in New York City”.

He worked in a manner associated with ero guro, a movement that arose around 1930 and combined eroticism with the macabre and the grotesque. His line is thin and simple, his colours bright, with smooth gradations, which is characteristic of chinto printing. He combined devices of shunga and yōkai with Western art; the Frenchman Tomi Ungerer was important to him. He drew his scenes from imagination, without models, and said in an interview that he doubted he could draw them if he were himself involved in them: distance was necessary. He described his aim as awakening the feelings that lie quietly asleep inside a person. Censorship accompanied him constantly.

In 1979 came the short film “Demain la petite fille sera en retard à l’école” by Michel Boschet, based on Saeki’s drawings; the following year it won the César for Best Animated Short Film. In 1990 the Paris publisher Albin Michel brought out his book “Japon Intime” (on the initiative of Romain Slocombe), but recognition in France came only some twenty years later. In the late 1980s he left Tokyo and lived and worked in a studio in rural Chiba Prefecture. In 1991 he published his first children’s book, “Tricks for Kids”, followed later by two more. Solo exhibitions were held in Tokyo (1971, 1999, 2009, 2018), San José (1985), San Francisco (2010), Hong Kong (2014), Tel Aviv and Toronto (2016) and Taipei (2019); his work was also shown at Art Basel Hong Kong. In Paris the Da-End gallery held his second solo show in France in 2010, “Kuro Hozuki”. The clothing brand Supreme used his drawings.

Saeki died on 21 November 2019. His family announced this only in January 2020. After his death, retrospectives were held in Paris, Los Angeles and Tokyo, and in 2021 and 2024 Da-End showed silkscreen prints never seen before. One of his images was used on the cover of Geordie Greep’s album “The New Sound” (2024).