Everything Should Involve Love: Hajime Sorayama

Love truly does make the world spin as opposed to money. The affinity for money is love in itself. Some are blessed to relish in love’s presence, others are spectators to their neighbors fantasy. Though, I would argue that we all experience love, whether we recognize it or not. Hajime Sorayama's paintings float on the polished edge of what is love and what is not, using the metalwork of chrome bodies to investigate inner emotional truths. His chrome-coated humanoids blur the lines between what is mechanical and what is sensual. Is this futurism or eroticism? I say both, as though I am human, I wish everything around me felt the love it was created with. Sorayama constructs a dense dialogue of reflection and transparency. The cold, mirror surfaces of his robots reflect back at the viewer's gaze, asking not what the robots are, but what we become when we look at them. In this transaction, Sorayama reveals a vulnerability: that reflection can be as intimate as transparency, if we look with empathy rather than judgment.

This tension is bolstered into to a broader opposition that defines Sorayama's work; the clash between the human and the machine. Despite the fact that his figures are machines, their postures, gestures, and facial expressions unmistakably express human feeling: seduction, curiosity, and even tenderness. We are not being shown robots in order to trivialize creation, because he gives them flaw, lust, and soul. This is why his work touches me, as I have discussed in my last writing, “To Survive With Expression is to Die with Intent,” that it is within my limitations that I find my freedom. His androids are not cold, mechanical objects, rather borders between the organic and artificial, the historical and the future. In this juxtaposition, Sorayama questions whether mankind exists in flesh and blood or in the capacity to feel, connect, and love.

    Within this framework, Sorayama's art is a quiet challenge to hatred and dehumanization. Amid a world increasingly polarized by the fear of what we’ve created ourselves, both physically and ideologically, his work refuses to succumb to cynicism. Instead, he prefers beauty, sensuality, and softness as acts of resistance. The robots, although steel, are not weapons, they are not warriors, they are not servants. They are somehow lovers, echoing our deepest desires as opposed to our aggressive impulses. In making machines that hunger for love instead of mastery, Sorayama envisions a future founded not on conquest, but on care.

    The duality of the reflective and transparent is a metaphor for how we perceive the love in our world and how it is exchanged. Must love be reciprocal, or do we empty ourselves dry to teach others to do the same? Sorayama's robots, just as humans, are complicated: seductive but distant, organic, but artificial. In a world now ridden with AI trash, art’s antithesis, they prompt us to think not merely about the future of human-machine relationships, but about the nature of humanness itself.

    Appearing to be a simple dialogue of romanticism, despite the limitations imposed by the laws of robotics, Sorayama allows us to perceive love for these robots. Even if they cannot conventionally feel the love he elicits, we feel it for them. He encourages us to imagine a world in which the difference between metal and flesh, between man and machine, is not feared but welcomed. In reflecting us to ourselves, his robots reflect for us the potential for our own capacity to bridge binaries. It is there, in this reflective space between what is and what could be, that Sorayama's work is no longer transparent to me.