Enslaved in bondage rope, penetrated by octopi or poised to take an imagined cock from behind, Sorayama’s hyper-real illustrations of human and android babes have titillated fans such as Stella McCartney and Aerosmith since the early 1980s, and his work has been part of the New York Museum Of Modern Art’s permanent collection since 2003.

But weirdly, Sorayama’s devilishly hot pin-ups don’t put a spring in his trousers. “My erotic art doesn’t focus on getting people off,” says Sorayama. “It’s the things that surround sex that make it sublime. When I look at the things that are erotic about women, it’s like going to a gourmet restaurant for an amazing dinner – rather than seeing women as sustenance, I enjoy the details that make up the experience.”

It’s all the better if those details twinkle. “I’ve always been attracted to shiny things,” he grins. “I love it when people in rubber clothing gloss up their gear with gel. I’m like a magpie or a primitive caveman.”

Stepping inside Sorayama’s studio in Tokyo is like entering a magpie’s nest. Pot plants, toys shaped like dominatrices, and illustrations of women about to cum while being pleasured by men’s tongues are crammed floor-to-ceiling in his cramped, dusty studio, and there isn’t a square inch of bare wall space.

A half-completed picture of his muse, Bettie Page, lies on his desktop, and his 3-D creations for Sony and Disney – the robotic dog AIBO and a futuristic Mickey Mouse – peer at him from their place on a cluttered table as Sorayama potters around in yellow Miffy slippers, making coffee.

Despite creating some of the most sexually explicit and boundary-pushing images in the Japanese art scene, Sorayama’s down-to-earth. He was a shy child who seldom put brush to paper: he did well in art during high school but wasn’t interested in pursuing it, so went to study Greek and English at university in 1965.

There Sorayama developed an otaku (geek) passion for sci-fi and started a college magazine called The Pink Journal. But he grew to hate university and transferred to Chuo art school in Tokyo.

After graduating at 22, Sorayama worked as an illustrator in advertising and was drawn to the voluptuous women and cheesecake images used in the industry. That stint as a commercial artist helped Sorayama to “create easily accessible images that can be enjoyed by anyone,” and he began painting hyper-realistic figures as a freelancer in the 1970s. “I wanted to communicate in a way everyone can instantly understand, rather than shrouding myself in esoteric or obtuse symbolism,” he explains.

In 1978 Sorayama cut loose and painted his first wank-worthy droid for a commission from Suntory drinks company. His first book, Sexy Robot, propelled his metallic hotties to fame when it was released in 1983, and he followed it up with Pin-Up in 1984 and seven others in the 1980s and 90s, including The Gynoids, the title for which combines the greek terms for woman (gyb) and image (droid).

After his first one-man show in Los Angeles in 1994, Sorayama began painting pin-ups every month for Penthouse, and since then he’s worked as a conceptual artist on spooky sci-fi films including Time Cop (1994), Spawn (1997), and the Russian vamp flick, Night Watch (2004).

Soryama’s a celebrity magnet and the walls of his studio are covered in Polaroids of Rod Stewart in drag, Dita Von Teese, and Julie Strain. He’s also got a large photograph of a severed hand taken by Kiyotaka Tsurisaki that was given to him by Marquis magazine fetish photographer Peter Czernich – the man who broke his innocence.

“I was doing work with fetish and rubber in it, but I didn’t realise there were large groups of people who were also into it,” Sorayama explains. “Then I got a call from Peter Czernich in Denmark, inviting me to a fetish party in Munich. It was great! There were so many porn stars and people with body piercings there.”

That said, Sorayama prefers the clinical, aesthetic side of titillation to the grubby reality in clubs: “I like fetishistic things, and they seem beautiful in photos, but up close, in real life, they’re less perfect. They’re really smelly. In Germany, I met Mask Man, who’s well known in fetish circles; he took off his hood, which seemed like a pain to wear, and he was sweaty, rubbery and stinky underneath.”

Sorayama’s desire for clean fantasy comes out in his work – each of his illustrations contrasts ethereal beauty with shocking content. “My ultimate goal is to make female images that women can look at and admire rather than take offence at,” Sorayama says. And although his women are sexual, he maintains they’re empowered – pleasured at their will, not violated by men’s sexual desires.

Although Sorayama’s wife and his girlfriend model for him, he insists the girls on canvas are illusions. “These images are fantastical, but they look so real that the brain thinks the women are real,” Sorayama explains. To get this effect, he paints each one in meticulous detail over 24-48 hours using acrylic, before touching them up with an airbrush.

Flashing a ‘fuck you’ cheeky grin, Sorayama won’t be drawn on whether his pictures are based on real women. “When I’m at a show, I say to people, ‘yeah, this one, she was good, but she committed suicide, and this one is in a mental hospital!’” he quips.

Inspired by art and cartoons that share Sorayama’s caustic attitude to convention, the artist has loved early Disney since he was in junior high school. “Mickey Mouse used to be a violent drunk,” he beams. “Then they made him a human vegetable, and got Donald Duck to do all the weird things. And then when Donald Duck became an idol, they made Stitch do all the bad stuff. It was more human in the 1930s when there were more characters with negative traits.”

Sorayama’s keen to see those traits resurrected. In 1999 Disney commissioned him to create a collectable robotic ‘Futuristic Mickey’. Originally he drew the time-travelling rodent flipping the bird, but Disney pissed on his parade. “I don’t like Disney as a company, it’s really regulated,” he says. “They were restrictive about what modifications I could make to Mickey’s personality, and I had to stick to the exact proportions dictated to me.”

Other giants on Sorayama’s client list include Levi’s and Coca-Cola, and he’s just finished working with New York-based toymaker KAWS – who “loves Mickey but is anti-Disney” – on a version of the mouse branded with an ‘X’. Sorayama’s also produced a salacious version of Alice from Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, and is about to get started on a horny version of Peter Pan’s Tinkerbell.

The word ‘cute’ isn’t in Sorayama’s vocabulary, and the Lolita-style dolls that appear across Japanese media and advertising piss him off with their “immaturity and inability to be responsible for their own will”. The closest thing to adorable that Sorayama’s created is AIBO, the robotic pet dog manufactured by Sony until 2006. But even that creation is meticulously designed so that each of its aesthetic components has a function.

Despite sticking two fingers up to convention, Sorayama’s ability to tap into people’s fantasies with military precision makes him a pop-art king who’ll continue to appeal to huge corporations and underground fetish fans with a thirst for anything saucy and shiny.

See more at Sorayama.net and Sorayama.com