Few people know that Hajime Sorayama once dreamed of becoming a pilot in his youth. The Japanese artist, internationally renowned for his "Sexy Robot" series, created a 12-meter mirrored robot sculpture for Dior's 2019 Pre-Fall menswear show and designed a custom helmet for F1 driver Lewis Hamilton. This time, what awaited him wasn't a runway, but an entire Airbus A350-1000 flagship widebody aircraft. STARLUX Airlines' gold-and-silver "STARLUX AIRSORAYAMA" jets officially took flight on July 12, piloted by Chairman K.W. Chang himself on a route to Tokyo. Sorayama personally inspected the finished work in Tokyo—what he called the largest-scale project of his career.
"It's not as simple as just painting the plane gold and silver—an enormous amount of effort went into this behind the scenes," said Chang. The project brought together four parties: STARLUX Airlines from Taiwan, Airbus from France, artist Hajime Sorayama from Japan, and Pantone, the American color institute. That lineup alone signals this is far more than a simple livery collaboration.
How to Achieve a Metallic Look Without Metallic Paint
Gold and silver are the two colors Sorayama has prioritized most throughout his career, and this time he wanted an effect that was "100% radiant—almost too dazzling to look at directly." The challenge: aviation coatings can't use metallic pigments that might interfere with aircraft performance. So Pantone didn't just mix colors—they engineered light itself, developing two exclusive shades for the project: Airsorayama Gold and Airsorayama Silver. The key technology lies in mica-effect pigments, which coat the pigment surface with metal oxides to reflect light, creating a shifting, dimensional sheen across the fuselage depending on the viewing angle. The entire paint job took 16 professional painters 20 days to complete.
