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Thursday 6 February

Yusuke Hanai: The False Prophet of Surf Melancholy

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, I’m going to talk to you about Yusuke Hanai, born in 1978, this Japanese artist who draws depressive characters as if he were the new Charles Schulz on acid. You know, those melancholic figures with strange proportions that invade our galleries with their supposed existential depth?

Let’s start with his first obsession: this unhealthy fixation on the American counterculture of the 1960s. Hanai presents himself as the spiritual heir of Rick Griffin, but his work is nothing more than a pale nostalgic copy of an era he didn’t even experience. It’s as if Sartre had tried to philosophize about the French Revolution – you can theorize all you want, but the authenticity of experience is glaringly absent. His empty-eyed characters, supposedly embodying Kerouac’s beat spirit, are merely superficial caricatures of a counterculture he fantasizes about from his native Japan.

This cheap cultural appropriation reminds me of those sushi restaurants run by Californians who’ve never set foot in Japan. The difference? At least the food doesn’t pretend to be authentic. Which brings me to his second obsession: this pseudo-celebration of “ordinary people” through his melancholic characters.

His bearded, depressed figures are supposed to represent humanity in all its vulnerability, but they’re just a collection of recycled visual clichés. It’s as if Camus decided to draw The Stranger as a comic – with only characters resembling depressed surfers. Walter Benjamin warned us about the loss of authenticity in the age of mechanical reproduction, but Hanai takes the concept even further: he mechanically reproduces melancholy itself.

What’s particularly irritating is how he serves us the same emotional soup in every piece. His slumped-shoulder, lost-gaze characters have become his signature, as if sadness were a product to be mass-marketed. Roland Barthes would have had much to say about this modern mythology of the “cool loser”. It’s become as predictable a trademark as Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans, but without the critical irony that made the latter interesting.

And don’t get me started on his collaborations with streetwear brands. Theodor Adorno would be rolling in his grave at the sight of melancholy turned into a fashion accessory, a decorative motif for €250 hoodies. Counterculture, meant to be a form of resistance, is reduced to a mere exercise in style, an Instagram-friendly aesthetic for millennials searching for meaning.

The technique? Sure, it’s there. Hanai masters his line work; I’ll give him that. But it’s like having beautiful handwriting with nothing interesting to say. His compositions are effective, his lines confident, but all of it serves a worldview as deep as a puddle on Malibu Beach. Michel Foucault taught us to look for hidden power structures behind cultural representations. With Hanai, these structures are so obvious they’re embarrassing: the omnipresent male gaze, the fetishization of melancholy, the commodification of counterculture.

His exhibitions resemble high-end merchandising installations, where each piece is calibrated to appeal to an audience that confuses depth with stylized depression. It’s the artistic equivalent of a Radiohead album played on loop by a teenager who’s just discovered existentialism – perhaps touching, but fundamentally superficial.

The most frustrating part is that Hanai is talented. You see it in certain details, in the way he captures bodily tension, in his compositions that sometimes achieve real evocative power. But he seems trapped in his own mythology, a prisoner of a style that’s become his gilded cage. Guy Debord warned us: the society of the spectacle turns everything into a commodity – even melancholy, even rebellion.

I can’t help but wonder what Jean Baudrillard would say about all this. In this simulacrum of counterculture, where sadness is an Instagram filter and rebellion a t-shirt motif, Hanai has become the perfect artist of our time – not because he critiques it, but because he embodies it perfectly, with all its contradictions and superficialities.

His characters always look downward or into the distance, as if desperately searching for a meaning that eludes them. Perhaps that’s the only authentic thing about his work: this perpetual quest for an elusive depth. But by recycling the same poses, the same expressions, the same atmospheres, Hanai has turned this existential quest into a marketing formula as predictable as the waves he loves to draw.

The problem isn’t that Hanai is a bad artist – he isn’t. The problem is that he has become exactly what the counterculture he so venerates fought against: a producer of calibrated content, pre-packaged melancholy, ready-to-wear rebellion. If the beatniks he so admires could see how their legacy has been turned into a luxury commodity, they’d probably cry – not with the elegant sadness Hanai loves to depict, but with genuine despair at the co-opting of their fight.

And as we contemplate his works in air-conditioned galleries, sipping champagne from crystal glasses, we all participate in this grand charade. We applaud the transformation of melancholy into a consumer product, of counterculture into a fashion accessory. Perhaps that, in the end, is the true sadness in Hanai’s art: not the sadness he draws, but the one he unwittingly represents – the tragedy of a time when even rebellion has become a registered trademark.

Pierre Bourdieu would probably see in Hanai’s success a perfect illustration of social distinction through cultural capital. His works have become status markers for a certain bourgeoisie that wants to appear both cultured and rebellious, sensitive and cool. It’s the artistic equivalent of a luxury hybrid car – a product that lets you flaunt your social conscience while remaining comfortably ensconced in privilege.

And you know what’s most ironic? While we debate the depth or lack thereof in his art within our privileged circles, his images are endlessly reproduced on social media, turned into memes, wallpapers, avatars, and even miserable NFTs. The mechanical reproduction Benjamin spoke of has become digital reproduction, and the loss of aura has transformed into a gain in followers. His sad characters have become existential emojis for a generation that confuses melancholy with a black-and-white filter.

I sometimes wonder if Hanai is aware of all this, if he secretly laughs at how his art has become exactly what it pretends to criticize. Or perhaps he’s sincere in his approach, also a prisoner of the system he feeds while trying to denounce it. Either way, the result is the same: art that bites its own tail, spinning in an endless loop of self-referentiality.

So yes, go see his exhibitions, buy his prints, wear his t-shirts. But don’t come to me saying it’s subversive art, that it’s a profound social critique. It’s high-end emotional design, existential marketing, rebellion in limited edition. And maybe that’s exactly what we deserve: art that perfectly reflects our time, not in what it denounces, but in what it has become.

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