Over a period of two years, Yokoo journeyed through all of Tokyo’s 23 wards with his camera, capturing forked roads in day and night scenes.
Phantasmic meaning series#
The Y-Junction series is one of the artist’s important trademarks. The collage method can be seen in Relation between Rose and Rose-Bud (1988, Equine Museum of Japan), Love Arabesque (2012, Collection of the Artist), and Homeland (2019, Collection of the Artist, Deposited in Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art), among others. Yokoo has consistently devalued perfection, and instead, pursued the relevance of the process. He began to devise experimental methods with intense brushstrokes, overlapping multiple screens, heavy drawings, and multi-dimensional collages of a canvas over another canvas.
This medium elevated his desire to connect more intimately to his ambiguous but multi-faceted “I”.
Phantasmic meaning free#
Yokoo decided in the blink of an eye to break free from graphics and switch to painting. This encounter changed his aesthetic direction completely. It served as the catalyst in his life when in 1980, he came across Picasso’s exhibition at the MoMA. The renaissance of Western modernism greatly influenced Yokoo’s artistic style. Yokoo immersed himself into the hippie era, psychedelic movement, flower children, Vietnam War, racism, and America’s revolutionary transition from the old regime to the liberal order. Having spent an enormous amount of time in New York. Several pieces have won international acclaim and have been acquired in 1967 by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where his solo exhibition was also installed in 1972. Many other captivating graphic works by the artist are found in the exhibition’s Graphics without Borders section. This provocative work was the artist’s radical attempt to challenge the state of culture and politics in post-war Japan and to deviate from the country’s acceptance of Western modernism. At the same time, at the bottom of the illustration, the words “Having reached a climax at the age of 29, I was dead” suggests his own death statement to break away from his past. Yokoo explains these symbols as representations of rebirth. On the upper corners are tiny pictures of the Shinkansen train and the nuclear bomb emerging from Mt.
There is a small photograph of Yokoo as an infant, and another resembling a high school group shot. The brilliant backdrop of red and blue rays is derived from the rising sun of the old Japanese flag, representing wartime Japan, with a reference to the Asahi Breweries trademark. The image depicts Yokoo in a black suit and formal shoes, clutching a red rose in his hand, and is hanging from a rope. One of his most celebrated graphic works is the famous Tadanori Yokoo (1965) (Collection of the Artist, Deposited in Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo). From age 22, he had already garnered several awards for his poster designs. Tadanori Yokoo began his career as a graphic designer in the 1950s, although he started designing posters when he was still in high school. This perception is a reflection of Yokoo’s deep interest in himself-in his “I” that grows from an eclectic culmination of his autobiographical narratives, childhood reflections and emotions, dreams, and visions that take him further to a dimension beyond his original roots, to something universal in his own self, like a “previous existence in the cosmos.” All human beings are born into this corporeal world from genkyo, and return to genkyo once more at the end of their physical existence. According to Yokoo, genkyo is the home and source of all human souls, the macrocosm, spirit world, and the premortal life. They attempt to interpret Yokoo’s inner philosophies through the concept of Genkyo, which can signify three meanings: the world of imagination, original homeland, and present state. The colossal exhibition, Genkyo Yokoo Tadanori being held at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo until Octois the largest showcase of the artist’s comprehensive collection spanning over sixty years and comprises more than 600 pieces of paintings and graphic works. His powerful works reveal not only jungles and paradises borne from his childhood memories wrapped in novels and movies, but also the underground and etheric worlds where all human souls rise and return after death. He encompasses all the facets of classical history, literature, religion, and political and social dogma, and delves into an alternate universe beyond our mortal reality. There may be no other Japanese artist who captures the profound realm of imagination, illusion, mysticism, spirituality, and the subconscious mind all intertwined in a psychedelic web of colors and expressions as freely and honestly as Tadanori Yokoo.
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