TOKYO -- It is not easy being a cultural icon who is also a symbol for an entire generation of Japanese artists. In the case of Tadanori Yokoo, who was born in 1936 and resides and works in Tokyo, besides living up to a reputation for precocious creativity, this well-known Japanese modern artist finds himself at age 87 examining and evaluating his substantial legacy -- and it is a monumental task.
In recent years, this exercise has come into sharp focus in the form of several exhibitions and publications, including a 10th-anniversary show at the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art in Kobe earlier this year. It looked back at previous exhibitions at this institution, which since its opening in 2012 has focused on Yokoo's multifaceted oeuvre. The artist's self-examination is also the focus of "Genkyo no Mori " ("Homeland Forest"), a fantasy-memoir published last year, in which Yokoo imagines himself in conversation with such legendary artists as Leonardo da Vinci and Pablo Picasso. Over the years, Yokoo has been a prolific author of essays, memoirs and travelogues, with autobiographical currents flowing through much of his writing.
His long-standing penchant for experimentation now forms a subtheme coursing through "Tadanori Yokoo: 100 Takes on Hanshan and Shide," a presentation of a large collection of the artist's more recent paintings at the Tokyo National Museum, where it is on view through Dec. 3.
The works featured in this stylistic smorgasbord were made during the pandemic years. Their shared themes are as retrospective as they are forward-looking. That is because Yokoo is an artist who rarely allows himself to stand too comfortably still. The discoveries he makes through observation and research, combined with those that come with the creation of each new work or group of thematically related paintings, serve as the fuel for his always unpredictable rounds of creative activity.
As an artist, Yokoo, who was born and grew up in Nishiwaki, a small town in southwestern Japan near Himeji and Kobe, is self-taught. Well read, with an extensive knowledge of art and cultural history, he began his career in his 20s as a graphic designer after moving to Tokyo, where he earned awards and attracted attention for his bold, unconventional posters for underground dance and theater companies. It was the era of the Beatles, pop art and trippy psychedelia. Yokoo's edgy, elegant posters eschewed the stripped-down aesthetics of Western modernism, whose influence had been felt in Japanese art and design since the early decades of the 20th century.
Instead, Yokoo developed a unique style. His compositions were filled with intriguing elements: the rays of Japan's traditional rising-sun flag; antique typography; motifs from ukiyo-e woodblock prints; and the design of old-fashioned consumer goods packaging and advertising. Yokoo sometimes threw personal references into such concoctions. For example, in "Made in Japan, Tadanori Yokoo, Having Reached a Climax at the Age of 29, I Was Dead" (1965), one of his most famous posters, he included a photo of himself as an infant along with his drawings of the shinkansen high-speed train, Mount Fuji, and the artist himself, hanging from a rope tied around his neck.
To many critics, that work was beautifully shocking. As Japanese art critic Yoshiaki Tono commented in Artforum in 1983, "Yokoo made clear his intention to use as the basis of his language as a designer the kind of corny, endemic, and 'pre-modern' elements [...] Japan had tried to cut off and abort through its period of modernization."
On a visit to New York in 1980, Yokoo saw the Museum of Modern Art's vast retrospective of the work of modernism's towering figure, Pablo Picasso, that included some 1,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, collages, prints, ceramics and other creations. Yokoo has described that impressive survey as "the first shock since the psychedelic movements of the 1960s," adding: "It was as if Picasso by himself did the whole history of painting, and I learned that you could do anything you want -- you could do multiple expression on a single canvas."
In a recent interview with Nikkei Asia at his studio in Tokyo's Setagaya Ward, the artist recalled his life-changing visit to that Picasso exhibition. "I went in as a graphic designer and walked out as a painter. I returned to Tokyo and turned my attention entirely to painting."
At that time, in Western Europe and especially on the New York art scene, neo-expressionism had become a prominent, dominant painting style. Often intentionally crude-looking, with irreverent subject matter and inaccurately rendered human figures, its ironic sensibility earned it the label as "bad painting." Whether or not Yokoo was directly influenced by such tendencies, his early paintings were marked by a loose, brushy handling of his materials, dreamy atmospherics, and unexpected juxtapositions of subject matter.
In "Tadanori Yokoo: 100 Takes on Hanshan and Shide," the artist is at it again -- not only mixing up technical flourishes and thematic references but also blending aspects of his personal history with that of art itself. In 2015, Yokoo was suddenly affected by hearing loss. Later, tendinitis made it painful for him to paint with his right hand -- his dominant hand -- but he persisted, using the force of his entire body to apply each stroke to a canvas.
Alluding to the fuzzy sense of consciousness provoked by his hearing loss, Yokoo developed an approach he calls "morotai," or, roughly, "hazy state," which is expressed in thickets and layers of brushstrokes in which foreground figures meld with or dissolve into the background, and sketchy outlines often do the work of suggesting whole forms.
