はやぴ: Living Alongside Gods

はやぴ (romanized as Hayapi) is a Japanese digital artist I’ve followed for some time whose work to me is stark and confusing yet also comfortable and familiar.
Their art centers on Lovecraftian horrors within everyday Japanese life. Many of the entities featured are incredibly large in scale, and horrifying in figure. They are often gruesome combinations of skeletons, multiple heads, and bulging eyes all over their bodies. Despite the menacing and otherworldy appearance of the subjects, they’re often participating in mundane activities such as sitting in on government meetings and riding the train.

Many of Hayapi’s works have also made me consider a religious aspect within their art. Some works reference Shinto, Japan’s native religion. Shinto centers around the belief that gods (referred to as kami) are believed to be present in all forms of nature. From this idea, the relationship between humans and the natural world became a vital aspect of Shinto and the ancient Japanese people. There is debate whether Shinto can be considered a religion or whether it is just a name given to a general set of beliefs around kami worship, but for this purpose, we’ll refer to Shinto as a religion with a primary focus on kami within nature.

Hayapi has created art referencing Shinto ceremonies and customs, such as a monstrous figure carrying a mikoshi (a miniature building for ceremoniously transporting deities during festivals), and a reimagining of a torii (a gateway commonly found at the entrance of Shinto shrines).

With the Shinto religion revolving around humanity’s relationship with these ever-present kami, I interpret much of Hayapi’s art through this relationship. Humans in their world must coexist with the same forces of nature we have always dealt with, but also cohabitate with the living manifestations of gods.
What I find most interesting about how Hayapi explores this is that the relationship is not shown to be all that different than ours. Even when surrounded by literal gods, humans find a way to adapt and conquer their environment. The art style of these entities at first glance could easily be interpreted as malevolent, yet they’re never directly shown to have any predilection for violence towards humans.
The gods depicted are giant beings with immense power, likely capable of wiping out large groups of people with ease. Yet just like in our world, humans are in control over their environment, kami included.

There is a series of works showing the relationship between humans and the kami of Hayapi’s world that live in the ocean. They are shown on display in aquariums, fished out of the sea, and eaten by a group of friends in a style reminiscent of a Japanese hot pot. The relationship depicted here is strikingly similar to that of a country such as Japan whose culture has so much to do with the ocean and how they’ve used it to support themselves over millennia.

That series got me to start to take notice of the attitudes of humans towards the gods within Hayapi’s artwork.
Despite the terrifying appearance of the kami, humans are never shown to be scared or even worried about their presence. It is a mere fact of life, they have always been here and will continue to be. The old man on the train shown earlier is riding next to a god with three full sets of teeth, a demon head coming out of its chest, and skulls for shoulders and kneecaps, yet is completely unbothered. He’s probably more likely to be annoyed that the god is sitting in the 優先席 (priority seats reserved for the pregnant and elderly) than concerned at all with any potential danger posed by his seat partner.

There are also several artworks showing the largest of gods being used in an industrial setting as a form of energy. Hayapi’s art takes place in contemporary Japan, with densely populated cities and modern industrial engineering, with the same large-scale energy needs we have today.

The development of permanent settlements throughout history marks the inversion of nature’s control over humanity. Utilizing natural resources through farming and engineering enabled humankind to move on from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle towards developing towns and cities with large populations requiring large amounts of resources harvested from the environment. The relationship between the Japanese people and the natural world has vastly shifted from a time when the ideas of Shinto and kami worship were prominent. An excellent exploration of this can also be seen in Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke.

From eating meat and using animal products, relying on industries such as logging, agriculture, and mining to supply us with resources, and living in a large city that undoubtedly has negative effects on its surrounding environment, Hayapi’s art evokes the idea for me in a visceral and frightening way that it is important to think about how one coexists with the natural world.