Hiroshi Nagai
Hiroshi Nagai (born December 22, 1947) is a Japanese graphic designer and illustrator, known for his cover designs of city pop albums in the 1980's, which established the recognizable visual aesthetic associated with the musically loosely defined genre. Biography  
Nagai was born on December 22, 1947, in Tokushima Prefecture, Japan. He was inspired to become an artist by his father who enjoyed oil-painted landscapes. Later, Nagai traveled to Tokyo, where he attemped to join art school, in which he was rejected. After a visit to the United States and Guam in 1975, he was impressed by its scenery, which became the starting point of his subsequent style. Gaining an interest in pop art, he took inspiration from English artist David Hockney. Americana became a key component in his art. From the 1980s onward, he created tropical and clear landscape illustrations as typified by the record jackets of Eiichi Otaki's A Long Vacation and . As city pop gained renewed interest at the turn of the century, and especially in the YouTube era, Nagai's work—having influenced the 21st century vaporwave style—gained wider recognition, to the extent that, in 2022, BroadwayWorld described him as a "legendary artist". References

1947 births
Living people
Japanese illustrators
Japanese graphic designers
Album-cover and concert-poster artists
Artists from Tokushima Prefecture