Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Tadanori Yokoo: DNF Anya Kouro

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Tadanori Yokoo: DNF Anya Kouro

by John McGee

Tadanori Yokoo’s small self-portrait near the entrance to this show of new work is a good introduction to the artist and his vision. It is a fairly conventional school picture kind of pose—just a head looking straight out from a banal blue background. Except that the face has been rotated 30 degrees counter-clockwise. The artist’s eyes, nose, and mouth are on diagonal, not horizontal lines relative to his head. This is Yokoo’s viewpoint—skewed.

Tadanori Yokoo, DNF Anya Kouro, 2001 
(Courtesy Hara Museum)

Yokoo, 65, is a modern art icon who merges Pop and traditional Japanese motifs into a form that is creepy and funny at the same time. Sometimes called the Japanese Warhol, Yokoo blends death, mysticism and the cosmos in paintings for  advertising kabuki theater and hanging on gallery walls. Ever since the poster that first brought him fame—a hanged man on a rising-sun field with small photos of himself in the corners—his work has bordered on the surreal, sometimes crossing into it, other times only hinting at its lurking presence. 

This show of new work at the Hara Museum is a varied display of style and technical skill illustrating Yokoo’s many-sided personal world—a series of mythological combats on small canvases, high-heeled shoes fashioned from skulls, a small plaster sculpture of a contemplative bodhisattva with the head of Mozart, and postcard carvings. The main work, though, is a series of large paintings of Y-intersections (crossroads) based on nighttime photos Yokoo took on a recent visit to his rural hometown of Nishiwaki, Hyogo Prefecture. Most are painted in a fairly realistic style and the narrow streets and commonplace buildings could be Anywhere, Japan. But then, being Yokoo, an unknown beyond seeps in and one scene goes monochrome red. In another painting, a streetlight explodes in radiating brushstrokes.

The title “DNF” is an abbreviation of “ A Dark Night’s Flashing,” a reference to Yokoo’s nocturnal photography and a play on the title of a Naoya Shiga novel. “A Dark Night’s Passing,” Shiga’s book about a writer’s search for self-identity is a classic of Japanese literature from the 1930s that struck a chord with Yokoo and his hometown sojourn. 

The artist’s signature—just a “Y” in the corner—iterates the autobiographical quality of the crossroad paintings. Both paths lead down darkened streets beyond the brightly-lit Y-crossing. But these are not the major and minor paths of Robert Frost, nor the good and evil opposition of western art history. Both roads are equally inviting, both seem to go somewhere (or nowhere). They may end in the same place or, just as likely, endlessly branch off. 

This seems to be Yokoo’s multipronged approach to life and art—why settle for one path when two (or more) are available? The crossroad is a way station for the unexpected, a place of endless possibility not irrevocable decisions. 

Ambiguous sexuality plays a part here too. Hundreds of waterfall postcards (waterfalls, Yokoo has said, have a sex, and some are hermaphroditic) cover the walls and ceiling of the stairwell. And he’s fascinated with the way the female members of the Takarazuka extravaganza mystically transform from women into men. He’s painted three of them in the center of a cosmic triptych—his model of the universe—where they dance on a pile of skulls. 

Whatever scientists may say about the “known” universe, Yokoo’s is constantly expanding, if at odd angles. 

This exhibition was held Oct 2001-Jan 2002 at Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Shinagawa, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

©2006-2008 John McGee. All Rights Reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission.