Blog 3: Remix artist in 80s

One of his best known works, A la Maison de M.Civeçawa was a poster designed for a performance by Tatsumi Hijikata’s Ankoku Butoh dance company. In A la Maison de M.Civeçawa, Yokoo again employed his stylish collage coated with dark humor, citing photos of Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (a novelist to whom the dance was dedicated to, top left corner), Hijikata and fellow Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno (on the rose stem in the middle of the composition), and the famous painting Gabrielle d’Estrées and One of Her Sisters from 1594. In the backdrop we find again the rising sun, Mt. Fuji, and Hokusai’s great waves. Interweaving the sexual and the political, the historical and the modern, the Western and the Japanese, A la Maison de M.Civeçawa (1966) was another bold declaration of Yokoo.

Tadanori Yokoo (b. 1936) has embraced an enormous variety of media — book designs, animation, prints, posters, album covers, Swatch watches, illustration and paintings. All of his works display a unique visual richness, alluding to a massive and eclectic array of artistic images and movements: Surrealism, Dada, Russian Constructivism, American Pop Art, contemporary Japanese popular culture and traditional Japanese art forms, especially the woodblock prints known as ukiyo-e.

Few artists of any medium have succeeded so well in capturing the visual inundation that comes from living in large, cosmopolitan cities. As Yokoo himself put it, “When I walk through the streets of Tokyo, it is not unusual for me to weave back and forth as if I were recovering from an illness.” His intricate, dreamlike designs are portraits of our turbulent and chaotic times that embrace both the high and low as well as burgeoning globalization.

reference:

http://guity-novin.blogspot.com/2010/06/chapter-33-pop-art.html

https://designobserver.com/feature/wild-at-heart-tadanori-yokoo/14588