Spirit Of The Beehive: An Interview of Ecologist and Zoologist Lars Chittka On The Emotional Intelligence of Bees

interview by Oliver Kupper
portraits by Jesper D. Lund 

Instinct is biologically hardwired into all organisms. But that doesn’t mean these ancient inclinations can’t be rewired and recoded to adapt to a changing world. For the past five decades, German zoologist Lars Chittka, a widely cited expert on insect sensory systems, behavior, communication, and cognition, has performed groundbreaking experiments with honeybees and bumblebees. Using flower reward models, he has discovered that these insects—once thought to be simple robotic droids of their primitive nature—have powerful emotions that rival humans. Chittka and his team have discovered that bees can use tools, foresee the outcomes of their actions, and they can learn complex dances in the dark of their hives to share the location and distance of food sources. His book, Mind Of A Bee (2022), gathers his deep insights on bee intelligence and looks beyond the hive mind psychology. But what can bees teach us about ourselves? 

OLIVER KUPPER What is your definition of instinct?

LARS CHITTKA That's a very good question. As opposed to a behavior that's acquired through learning, it's one you are equipped with from birth, or you're pre-equipped to develop at some point in life. That doesn't mean that it's unalterable, but at least there's something there from the start. We humans often think that we're entirely free from instincts. And we are perhaps freer from instincts than most other animals, but we do have them. There are behavior routines that are common and pre-configured in all humans—so long as they don't have any disorders—such as language: the key ingredient of culture.

KUPPER In your book, The Mind Of A Bee (2022), you have a chapter dedicated to instinct. Can you talk about how instinct plays a role in insect intelligence and emotion? 

CHITTKA There is a sense that insects are basically little robots that are entirely pre-configured with everything they need to do in their lives. It is true that there is an amazing repertoire in social insects when it comes to innate behaviors. In honeybees, the construction of a hexagonal honeycomb is at least partially innate. They fine-tune it by learning, but no other animal does it in this form, and to some extent, that is an instinct. Likewise, the ways larvae are provided with food are instinctual. So, there is a very high diversity of innate or instinctive behavioral routines in social insects. But on the other hand, they can learn a lot. And that is the part that's often forgotten. I think people see this as being one or the other: if there's lots of instinct, then these animals might not be able to learn much. Of course, we have discovered that they not only learn things that you might predict, like how to use flower colors or scents as predictors of the sugar rewards that bees find in flowers, or the location of their hive, but they can also learn things that they don't encounter in their daily lives. They can count, recognize images of human faces, use tools, and manipulate objects. They are pre-configured to be really good learners. There are also some good examples where instinct and flexibility come together. For example, they obtain all of their nutrition from flowers, which means that they have to be really good at finding just the flowers that offer the best rewards. This means they have to then learn how these flowers look. Bees can learn to associate flower signals, patterns, and colors with rewards, but they don't know which particular signals these will actually be; they're flexible in that regard. Having flexibility is part of their configuration.

KUPPER When did you become interested in insects, particularly bees? 

CHITTKA I've worked with bees since 1987. Even as a kid, I found them fascinating in terms of their weirdness. My mother reminded me recently of when I liked to use my fishing net to catch about a hundred hornets by putting the net over the nest, and then the net over a bucket. I had this whole bucket full of hornets and miraculously managed not to get stung. My parents were completely freaked out by this. Also, I had this single by the Cure, “The Walk” (1983), which featured a big fly on the cover. I was probably about eighteen then. This was a while before I became interested in insects scientifically, which started later in the 80s.

KUPPER In the beginning, you weren’t necessarily focused on insect intelligence or sentience. 

CHITTKA For a long time, I was fascinated by the perceptual world of bees—the way that they see the world in completely different colors and through completely different sensory filters than we do, and to some extent, by their intelligence. For example, the numerosity study was quite early actually in my career. That was in the early 90s. At that stage, and actually, for another ten to fifteen years, I didn't yet extrapolate from the work that we did on bee intelligence the question of, hey, if they're that smart, maybe they also can feel something? It was a very different world then. When I was a Ph.D. student in the 90s, I remember discussions with established neuroscientists who claimed that there was nothing to worry about by doing invasive neuroscientific procedures on cats or monkeys, because they weren’t considered sentient. Of course, now there is much more scientific work on animal welfare. In the entire field, we're nudging each other to explore these very different minds from ours. 

KUPPER There's nothing scientifically conclusive, but you're pretty close to confirming that bees can indeed feel things. 

CHITTKA You're right. There's no universally accepted proof that anything is conscious or sentient. And we see this very prominently at the moment in the media when people are asking the question of when artificial intelligence systems could be sentient or conscious. It's not an easy question. We have to rely on probabilities and common sense. For anyone with a pet dog, if you know your animal well, it becomes quite obvious that there is something going on in their heads—they're not just reflex machines. But there are still people out there who claim that the human animal is the only one with consciousness. But with bees, as you say, like with other non-human, non-speaking entities, we still have no certainty. But from the probabilities that we see across a range of different experiments—not just psychological or behavioral studies, but also neurobiological and hormonal ones—it seems quite likely that there are some emotions. 

KUPPER And it's impossible to know what those emotions are. However, it's still interesting to speculate. 

CHITTKA As you suspect, it's very hard to answer that question. Even in humans—let's say we identify a piece of music that we both like, we might actually feel the same thing while we're listening to it, but it's very hard to compare such things. It’s even more difficult with an organism that can't verbally comment on what it's experiencing.

KUPPER But bees have some kind of language. Can you talk a little bit about the language of bees?

CHITTKA The communication system of bees, of course, is fantastically alien. They communicate through stereotypical movements, or a dance. They do this on a vertical surface in the complete darkness of the hive. They can't see each other, so they have to feel each other doing this dance. And the dance language informs other bees within the hive of the coordinates of a food source. They are dancing in a roughly figure-eight-shaped movement pattern again and again. Where the two lines cross over on the number eight, there is sort of a horizontal section where the bees run straight ahead before doing a semi-circle to one side, then a semi-circle to the other side. But this central straight run is the most informative bit. The angle of the run is relative to the angle of the food source relative to the sun and the hive. So, if that run goes straight up before doing the next half circle, that tells other bees to fly in the direction of the sun. So, up means fly to the sun. If it's straight down, that tells the other bees to fly opposite the direction of the sun. And let's say if it's 90 degrees to the right of gravity in the darkness of the hive, that tells other bees to fly 90 degrees to the right of the sun. The longer this run, the further away is the food. So, there is a kind of symbolic indication of the direction and distance. And to come back to the overarching theme here, this is of course an instinct that is on display. No other species of animal does anything even closely similar. Back to the dichotomy between instinct and learning, just a few months ago, there was a new study that came out showing that honeybees have to learn precision in their dance. If they don't get the opportunity to attend other bee dances while they're very young, they still display the dance language, but it’s quite a messy dance and not very accurate. 

KUPPER Our relationship with bees is ancient, which makes them even more important to understand. Can you talk a little bit about our history with bees and human civilization?

CHITTKA Most people are now aware that bees are important because they pollinate our crops and our pretty garden flowers. But that's a perspective only through utility, of course. But the other thing that they provide for us is sweetness by way of honey. For many millennia, before you could go down to the convenience store to buy a bag of sweets, the sweetest food was honey. And people have known this for a long time. 

There are many prehistoric cave paintings depicting humans raiding honeybee colonies. In prehistory, before people came up with the idea of putting bees in boxes, they were stealing from wild colonies because they knew it was such a precious commodity. Beekeeping became a trick to have constant access to honey. This happened in many cultures, not just in Europe. The Mayans had their own species of bees, Asian bees were also kept for many millennia, and then in Egypt as well. So, this practice of keeping bees in boxes for honey production is also an ancient one. But on top of that, in many cultures, bees, because of their perhaps complex societies, were revered as deities or something magical. For example, in the Mayan culture, there are beautiful depictions of the bee queen. And there are some people who think that the consumption of energy-rich honey in our distant evolution might have given us the kind of energy that we needed to grow our brains as big as they are. It's a beautiful speculation. 

The interesting thing is that, indeed, all great apes also steal honey from bees and many use two sticks to reach into bee colonies to steal honey. Even some present-day hunter-gatherer societies still spend quite a bit of their time looking for honey in the wild. It’s a very precious commodity, and it's been with us for a long time.

KUPPER I've seen footage of people harvesting hallucinogenic honey. 

CHITTKA This is in tropical Asia where some species of bees actually do not nest in boxes and can't be domesticated because they're actually very aggressive. They're also huge. They are hornet sized. They have just a single two-dimensional comb, but it's the size of a steam engine wheel. They're huge structures, usually attached to overhanging cliffs or sometimes tall trees. The honey from these colonies is not easy to obtain because you have to climb up and down at great heights. Some varieties of this type of honey are hallucinogenic, but others are just revered for their sweetness. Harvesting the honey involves tying a really flimsy ladder to a tree at the top of a cliff, then climbing down this ladder with no protection. It's part of these professional honey hunters' pride that they don't wear a veil. They're also suspended several dozen meters in the air, under constant attack from these highly aggressive bees holding on with one hand to the ladder, they then cut pieces of comb from these colonies while someone else underneath stands there with a bucket trying to capture, catch the pieces of calm. So, you’re risking your life in multiple different ways at the same time.

KUPPER Industrial beekeeping causes an enormous amount of stress to the hives. Can you talk about almond milk harvesting in California and the damage done to bees that are used as pollinators?

CHITTKA The usage of bees in this sort of big business pollination industry is probably aligned with the outdated notion that they really are reflex machines and there's nothing to worry about. Imagine during the peak of the Covid pandemic, moving the entire US population to Long Island, keeping them all there for three weeks, and then sending everyone back. There wouldn't have been a single person spared, presumably. But that's more or less exactly what happens with migratory beekeeping. A large fraction of North American honeybees are ferried into a very tiny portion of the country where they are exposed to monocultures of flowers, which are also heavily coated in pesticides. So, there's no diversity of floral food. And then, they're brought back to either their region of origin or another part of the country where a different crop is growing. All of this, of course, is extremely stressful. You have seen these reports of colony collapse disorder in the media. In my opinion, this is just basically the result of very inconsiderate beekeeping practices. Your average backyard beekeeper who looks lovingly after a few colonies, typically doesn't have these same kinds of problems.

KUPPER Aside from dismantling monoculture industrialization, what are some of the solutions for protecting bees from these industries?

CHITTKA I think it's fair to say that any improvements in welfare will cost money. If you want to pollinate the California almonds while also taking into consideration the welfare of the bees, then you'd have to do it with fewer bees—with hives that are in the area anyway. It's possible that having a reduced number of bees, and largely local bees, would probably reduce the crop to some extent. Of course, you'd also have to provide more than a monoculture. And you would have to set aside some field margins to grow other wildflowers so that there's more diversity. But I'm guessing farmers won't necessarily like that because it will cut maybe 10% of the area that they're currently using for almond monoculture. The price of your almond milk might go up a bit, but I think that's probably what needs to be done. 

KUPPER What's the greatest lesson you've learned from your work with bees? 

CHITTKA Well, the big picture idea is that I have more respect for the strange minds of other animals. My journey began really with a fascination for the strange sensory world and the general strangeness of social insects. In the past, people have commented that bees are a bit like magic—the more you draw out of them, the more you discover. And on a discovery-by-discovery basis, it's been a bit like that. When we first found out that bees can count, everyone stood there in disbelief. And that continued when we trained them to recognize photos of humans. And when we first saw them rolling a ball to a destination, and so on. Five years earlier, we wouldn’t even have thought this was possible. There have been lots of really rewarding things that we've had the fortune to see. 

The Animal Within Knows Better

text by Angelo Flaccavento

Once, on a car ride to visit textile mills in the Piedmont region of Italy, a billboard at the entrance gate of a factory got my attention. It spelled out: Change is inevitable. The slogan hit the spot. It became a sort of mantra. Indeed, change is inevitable: an inexplicable force of nature, a dynamic principle one simply cannot resist, nor escape. Change is exciting just as much as it is excruciating: you never know when it is going to happen and where it will lead. One can just go with the flow. The unknown: is there anything more exciting?

When it comes to fashion and creative activities, however, change is also a sort of commandment. As such, far from satisfying a deeply human urge, or releasing a bolt of energy, change turns into a fabricated need: one that can easily result in addiction—it is elating, after all—and, consequently, erosion. When this happens, which is in fact every given second in this data and image-saturated era, change turns into something deadly rather than healthy, limiting rather than liberating, unnatural rather than natural. In the end, change becomes a bad thing, because it’s not even change, but a coating of varnish over nothingness, a forcible application of makeup, so to speak, limited to the surface of things, with no effective outcome. A waste of energy: that’s it. 

Modernity thrives on change and renewal as the only values that truly count. It’s the epitome of modernity. Modernity is fast, forgetful, and has an insatiable hunger for more modernity. Digital media and the culture of global connection have made this appetite monstrous. Fashion, being the pinnacle expression of modernity, brings such proclivities to a farcical level, be it in the production of objects and artifacts, or in the creation of images. The only mantra that counts, in bold capitals and bolder exclamation marks is: NEXT! There is not even time to digest the metaphorical morsel. The hunger for newness arises while chewing, so to speak. It’s paradoxical, in a way, but oh so evident: what is the height of desirability and the embodiment of one moment, becomes obsolete and despicable the next. There is no way around it. Actually, the more modern a thing is, the more obsolescence is fast and merciless. 

Within this senseless frame, change becomes a veritable burden, an inescapable crux. It’s not only what keeps the industry going, but also what keeps commerce afloat and consumer engagement alive. The shared assumption, in fact, is that one has to reinvent the wheel at the fastest speed, because a new piece of work is per se better than the one before, just because it is new. It’s the idea that incessant renewal is the sign of true creativity, which means there is no time to really hone and fine-tune ideas, and it all gets rather destructive, for the brain as well as for the planet we inhabit. But hey, blame such detrimental fury on capitalism. 

Don’t get me wrong: there is not one single rule that’s good for all and applies to all. Change is the creative currency a bunch of creators naturally handle—Picasso, anyone? Ms. Prada, too—while there are others who devote their entire career to fine-tuning one single idea—Mr. Armani, above all; Constantin Brancusi, perhaps. Both routes are valid; generalizing is bad. What truly matters, in fact, is sticking to one’s guns, listening to one’s instinct, and following it. 

I’m finally getting to the point. The above detours around change were just a door to the guts and instincts I meant to commend. Ever-changing or timelessly still, being true to oneself is the matter here: carving one’s own niche and confidently inhabiting it, not looking for approval or validation from the outside. This requires a lot of focus, stubbornness, and quite a dose of self-esteem, not to mention the ability to make one’s instincts clear and operative. The system is a seducer: it gets close as easily as it drifts away, and this can corrupt and make one lose purpose. Having the guts not to care requires a certain heroism if not a little egotism. It’s an endless fight, probably, but one that is creatively rewarding and intrinsically corroborating, because it connects to the guts of the inner animal within us.

Staying in one’s own space is what matters. The density must be high, in order to sit above the trifles and minutiae that are so desperately essential everywhere else. Sticking to one’s guns is a matter of mastery. So is the certitude that one can only be modern once in a lifetime, and the rest is, at best, maintenance. Within this mindframe, it’s better to build one’s own shed, so to speak, rather than desperately trying to catch the uncatchable and ending up desperate, with no direction home. On top of that, true modernity, which is not the modernity that is so easily praised everywhere, is timeless, no matter what they say. Once modern, always modern. Time will single out and celebrate the masters later. It’s a question of patience.

Sticking to one’s guns means instinctively expressing who one is and what one feels, avoiding the cheap tricks designed to conquer the market, sell nothingness and gain some kind of highly forgettable relevance from it. There is no other way than to take the time to hone one’s formula. That’s what makes a creator unique. Being one’s self, after all, is an act of endless repetition, day after day. It’s an act of poetry, too, which is also a perfect metaphor to cherish repetition above senseless change. As a finely honed activity of constant verbal and formal refinement, poetry revolves around a bunch of topics—feelings, mostly. Love, loss, or melancholy are what they are, and yet there are millions of ways to express them. Poetry is about modulation in repetition. It’s about telling the same things all the time while telling them differently each and every time. It is a matter of subtlety, be it a whisper or a shout. Subtle: an almost punk stance in these most blatant of times. 

That’s it, reader. Authenticity matters, and the only way to be truly authentic is by listening to those deep-steeped instincts, even when they are contrary to one another. The animal within knows better. 

Hajime Sorayama

interview by Jeffrey Deitch
photography by Flo Kohl

Hajime Sorayama’s trademark chrome-plated erotic pin-ups are erotically charged symbols of a cold, dystopian future, but there is much more to these gynoids than meets the eye. Blending a rich history of Japanese illustration, Tokyo underground, and Western pop, Sorayama’s sexualized machines are metaphorically prescient of the blurred lines between sex and labor, the corporeal body and artificial intelligence, the past and future.

JEFFREY DEITCH About six years ago, I entered the Nanzuka booth at Art Basel Hong Kong. Usually there’s a lot of sameness at art fairs, but this was a complete and coherent aesthetic world. I was just amazed. I said to Shinji [Nanzuka], “I want to work with you. I want to collaborate. I want to do things with you.” And Shinji curated a great show for us, Tokyo Pop Underground. Hajime Sorayama was, of course, the star of the show. It brought to New York and Los Angeles this whole aesthetic that Shinji has articulated and translated. Shinji, maybe you can talk about Tokyo Pop Underground and this unique approach that fuses fine art and pop culture, Japanese culture, and international art.

SHINJI NANZUKA In Japanese history, we didn't have the word or context for fine art until relatively recently. Of course, we had applied arts, like printing and ceramics—objects we used for daily life. But only during the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when Japan started to become more receptive to the Western world, did we translate the word art into the Japanese language, which became bijutsu—bi for beauty and jutsu for craft. Then, after the complete devastation of WWII, we imported a new, democratic philosophy from the United States. But most Japanese artists didn’t understand contemporary art. We had a deeper cultural context within comic art, like manga or anime, or magazine illustration. And even before the war, we had a Parisian art style from the 18th or 19th century, but it was very hierarchical. So, there wasn’t an understanding to explore this new cultural aesthetic in the art field. Personally, I had a much deeper understanding of some of the artistic subcultures. And that’s why I wanted to work with artists within the commercial field, like Sorayama, Keiichi Tanaami, Harumi Yamaguchi, and more. These artists are more important to me because they represent a new aesthetic language in Japan from the ’60s and the ’70s. And they had an attitude to represent our struggle after the war, which implemented Western artistic philosophies into an Asian country. This is what I wanted to explore in the Tokyo Pop Underground show together with Jeffrey, which was a big project for me, a dream project. I’m very happy that you made it happen.

DEITCH Mr. Sorayama is such a cultural hero. How did you connect with him and bring him into the mainstream art world?

NANZUKA Sorayama never thinks of himself as a mainstream artist. (laughs) He says that he is more of an entertainer. You know that he is quite popular in Japan. Everybody knows his design, the Sony AIBO, or perhaps his album jacket art, like for Aerosmith’s album, Just Push Play (2001). In the ’70s and ’80s, most Japanese people must [have] run into his work because it was everywhere in the city: on advertisements and magazine covers. When I had a Keiichi Tanaami show for the first time in 2007, Sorayama came to the opening and I asked Tanaami to introduce me to him because I really wanted to work with Sorayama. Erotic art is not rare in Japan. It’s kind of popular, even for young people. Even in newspapers, it’s really easy to find his work. So, I never thought he would be too controversial for the art world, because we can talk about sex in the art world here. That’s why I didn’t hesitate to work with him, even though nobody was interested in him. In the beginning, though, I struggled because I wanted him to paint new female robots. After all, he wasn’t doing that anymore when I met him.

DEITCH So, I see there are works in progress in the studio. Can we talk about the new paintings?

SORAYAMA I painted my version of Maria from the movie Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang for an exhibition at the Pola Museum in Japan. Maria’s original design is not as feminine, so I tried to use my form of plastic surgery to make her look more beautiful and feminine, more proportional, make the legs and the arms bigger, the body more shapely. I tried to paint a human skin but it turned out to be metal (laughs). In Metropolis, as Maria transforms into a robot, there is an electric signal surrounding her, so I painted the circular currents.

DEITCH It’s so fascinating that this is very much a combination of Japanese and European-American aesthetics. And It’s also a lot of the fine art tradition: the history of sculpture, but also the history of popular culture. Sorayama mixes it all.

SORAYAMA This is the challenge for me: to create a better aesthetic for robotic design in the 21st century. For example, the original Maria was too classical, too lavish for me. I wanted to make an update for this century—an old identity breaking through to the new.

DEITCH It’s very interesting—the eroticism of the robot. This is something that characterizes contemporary society, that there’s an erotic desire that is connected with a robot. That a robot can create this desire in a more intense way than a human.

SORAYAMA (laughs) You think so?

DEITCH Well, that’s the big question. I saw the reaction to your sculptures in our show. People were so erotically attracted to them. The question is: are people today programmed to be more erotically attracted to a robot, an image of a robot, more than an actual human in some cases?

SORAYAMA This is what I want: to bring people’s wishes and desires into my paintings. I always paint over and over my previous work, and so far this is my latest and best version. I make it like a practice, an exercise. Most likely if I saw this painting again in three years, I would want to change everything about it.

DEITCH It looks like such a powerful painting.

NANZUKA I always meet with young audiences going to see Sorayama’s work and they think it’s only about the erotic painting. Even artsy people have said Sorayama’s work is just about sex. He always tries to surprise people.

SORAYAMA I’m always looking for anything new to make people surprised.

DEITCH There’s a comment that you made when I asked about introducing Sorayama into the mainstream art world, Shinji. You said, “Well, he doesn’t want to be in the mainstream art world—he’s more interested in just being part of contemporary culture rather than specifically the art world.”

SORAYAMA I don’t really care about any category of art or subculture—I'm just happy if it’s interesting.

DEITCH I want to ask you about something special that we arranged. Elon Musk, who’s not known as an art collector, was fascinated by your work. He bought one of your sculptures, installed it in his home, and then asked, “Can I talk with Mr. Sorayama?” What did you talk about with Elon Musk? Did he want you to come to outer space with him?

SORAYAMA I actually had two meetings with Elon Musk. He asked me to make a flag for his Mars colony—like the flag of a country. I suggested one of my erotic robots flying over Mars. Elon was not satisfied because he had something specific in mind, like a spaceship landing in a civilized Mars colony. I said, “If you want a normal illustration like this, you should go to another artist.” He listened to my opinion and we went our separate ways. We just talked. It’s a very funny story.

OLIVER KUPPER Do you see your robots as being some harbinger of what to imagine in the future?

SORAYAMA (Laughs) I’m not interested in the past or future. But people do recognize my work as futuristic. I just like metal as a material. It’s shiny and I like the way light reflects from it. And I like the female form. So, I just combined what I liked and that's it. But if you think about the future of robotics, people probably won’t use metal because it's heavy, and it's very hard. Carbon is maybe more realistic. The fact that people think my paintings are futuristic is a trick of the imagination.

KUPPER So, it's more of an erotic fantasy.

SORAYAMA Yes, these are my desires. It’s my take on desire. Eros is not only sex. But, what’s funny is that sometimes I’ll post these realistic paintings of female nudes on Instagram—usually their AI bans this type of art but because my nudes are robotic, they are never banned. So, my robots are fighting against their robots (laughs).

KUPPER Jeffrey and Shinji, I'm curious about both of your instincts to show work like Hajime's—work that fits somewhere in the netherworld between commercial and fine art. To have the bravery to show this kind of work.

DEITCH When you show work that has a transgressive quality, it's essential to show it in a perfect presentation. So, we worked quite hard, and Shinji's installation plan was brilliant. We presented the work with such authority. Everything in the installation was perfect. People saw the same kind of standards that you use for artists who were well-established in the fine art space, and the work became very convincing. So, yes, if you're going to show work that challenges people, you've got to do it with total confidence. Don't hide it behind a black curtain. Present it the same way you would any other artist who you think is outstanding and who you admire. And we had many museum people, in addition to lots of young people, who could relate to this work as an extension of a subculture that they participate in.

KUPPER Shinji, where did your instinct to show work like this come from? I mean, there are so many artists in the world. What was it about these artists that made it interesting in a fine art context?

NANZUKA People still think of fine art in the traditional sense or “arts for art’s sake.” But there are creative people everywhere and in many different fields and contexts. Like I said earlier, we have a deeper context for manga in Japan—more than fine art, probably. For me, working with these established commercial artists in the fine art field, I have to explain their context. Context is kind of like a trick I use as part of the explanation. This is why it’s good to know art history, because I can use an art language. So, that's why Nanzuka is in a unique position—between a commercial and fine art gallery. It's totally natural for me to work with those commercial artists because commercial artists have experience working with clients. They have very flexible minds, like Taanami, who's now eighty-six years old, and Sorayama is seventy-six years old. These two can talk about creativity together and what they can do next—this creativity and flexibility is important in the contemporary art field.

DEITCH Something that I want to mention—with my experience of presenting the two Tokyo Pop Underground shows, the audience does not differentiate between fine art, illustration art, commercial art, or subcultural art. Maybe the museum elite differentiates, but that wall is breaking down. The young audience does not. So, there's a lot of similarities now between the Japanese audience and the American audience of not looking down, saying, “Oh, this isn't real art.” It was really fascinating to see the whole art world opening up and changing.

KUPPER Hajime, how do instinct and intuition play into your work? Where does that instinct come from? How do you use instinct? And what is the mechanism of instinct in your illustrations, sculptures, and paintings?

SORAYAMA I have a memory from being a child—on the way back from school, I stumbled upon a small metal factory. There was a big metal cutting machine and I watched a shiny spark produce a piece of carved metal. From that moment, I was addicted to going to this factory and watching these machines every day. I still like watching metal: my eyes follow all the metallic parts in the city. Of course, I recognize a metal fetish in myself. There is always shiny stuff in the studio. But, I’m not really too conscious about my inspirations. I just know that I have never stopped. I just want to constantly paint in my studio. I don’t care about high art, commercial art, low brow, high brow, I just concentrate on my creative desire. That’s why I was very comfortable during COVID (laughs), because it was quite silent in the studio.

KUPPER We are living through a new culture war where erotic art is being censored and even banned. I'm glad you are continuing to push the boundaries. Is it similar in Japan right now?

NANZUKA It’s much better in Japan than in the United States. I'm not afraid to show work at my gallery. People never try to shut down my shows.

SORAYAMA Instead of facing that backlash head-on, there’s a way to get through it and make fun of the pressure; to use my creativity to get through it. I’m happy in my little category and I don’t listen to those high-minded people.