Harumi Yamaguchi’s Powerful Pinups

With their bare flesh and voluptuous figures, sometimes wearing high heels and other times relaxing in a swimming pool or about to engage in a boxing match, and all in a deluge of pop colours, the women who appear on artist Harumi Yamaguchi‘s canvases stand out. Their perfect figures, flirting with the erotic, were a means for the artist to support the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s.

Harumi Yamaguchi was born in 1941 in Shimane Prefecture. After finishing her studies at Tokyo University of the Arts, the artist joined the advertising team for the department-store chain Seibu as an illustrator. She developed her skills there before establishing herself as a freelance artist, and created these women with impressive physiques for the PARCO chain of department stores. Thus, over one hundred images were produced between 1969 and 1986, all of which are compiled in the book Harumi Gals. 

Idealised bodies

Inspired by German photographers Helmut Newton and Ellen von Unwerth, known mainly for their photographs of nudes, Harumi Yamaguchi eschewed cameras in favour of the less widespread medium of airbrushing, and was, in the late 1960s, one of the only artists in Japan to use this technique for realistic artistic  production. ‘While appearing to adhere to the scenario of male-tailored eroticism, Yamaguchi deconstructs male desire through her exaggerative depictions. As a consequence, the female body is idealised to a realm unreachable by male hands’, declares Chizuko Ueno, Japanese sociologist and feminist, in an essay written to accompany the Women of the 70s PARCO Poster Exhibition 1969-1986 held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in 2001. ‘The women are utterly paralysing in their availability, their sexuality is ripe, confidently displayed but protected by an airbrushed veneer.’

The artist keeps her Harumi Gals alive today. She created a collection in collaboration with 2G studio in which her powerful, modern women appear proudly on shirts and jackets, continuing her quest for the empowerment of women with the younger generations. 

Harumi Gals (2016) by Harumi Yamaguchi is published by Hioshina.