Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Tadanori Yokoo: All Things in the Universe (long version)

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Tadanori Yokoo: All Things in the Universe (long version)

by John McGee

Tadanori Yokoo, DNF: Anya Kouro Traveler's Night, 2001 oil on canvas, 182x260cm
(Photos: ©Norihiro Ueno and courtesy the artist)

Tadanori Yokoo's paintings are like well-stocked but somewhat shabby antique stores—you could spend hours browsing through crammed displays of memorabilia hauled from his dusty cranial attics. Whether you end up with a treasure or a trinket, you will enjoy the looking. 

This major retrospective of Yokoo, 66, follows exhibitions of his graphic work at Laforet Museum in 2000 and of new paintings at the Hara Museum in 2001. It also comes three years after his contemporary, Yayoi Kusama, was canonized with a retrospective at MoT. Constructing a clear family tree of Japanese contemporary art history has never been easy, but this show clearly dubs Yokoo as oji-Pop to Kusama's oba-abstraction. 

Tadanori Yokoo, Self Portrait, 1965, 
silkscreen on paper, 103x72.8cm

Yokoo started in, and continues to practice, graphic design. Perhaps as a result, he's often regarded overseas as a designer rather than an artist. In Japan, such distinctions are usually less clear and less important. This show of nearly 400 works includes a few select ads but focuses on Yokoo's paintings, plus a smattering of video and sculptures, from 1965 to today. Nineteen different sections help identify general themes like "portraits" and "love and eroticism" as well as those uniquely Yokoo: "forest and flesh," "waterfalls," "Mishima" and "red." 

Yokoo primarily paints figures and landscapes. He collages, folds, overlays and interweaves images from old movies, Old Masters and his UFO contacts. Goldie Hawn squeezing her nipple in a Mona Lisa wilderness, a sailor-suited schoolgirl with her hand in her blouse in front of the Imperial Palace—Yokoo's mid-'60s hippie funk, pink-nude-woman-
in-landscape paintings are his most admired. 

Even after Yokoo made his famous "painter's declaration" in 1981 (indicating his intention to make art), he continued to incorporate a variety of Japanese design methods, like bright ukiyo-e color, complex interlaced patterns and overprinting. But he calls Francis Picabia his "father in art" and Western art history in general—from da Vinci to Duchamp—is a primary source for his later work. His paintings can be hilarious one-liners, like his twin homages to Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy, which feature the normally sedate lion as predator and the gypsy as the meal. 

But sometimes humor and good intentions aren't enough. Yokoo is prolific, and many works are too fast and furious—loose paint, loose figures, loose concepts. To his credit, he wields obsession and whimsy with great energy. His waterfall postcard collection fills the walls and ceilings of one big room and psychedelic versions of animated Coors Beer waterfalls—"technamations"—fill another. 

Tadanori Yokoo, Relation of Cause and 
Effect between Michelangelo and Hokusai, 
1990, acrylic on canvas, 227.3x162.1cm

Yokoo's masterpiece of kitsch is a two-faced landscape sculpture crawling with action figures. The front is a 3-D scale-model of Rome's Trevi Fountain and Duke of Poli palace. An oversized woman reclines across the top of the cracking palace facade. Pachinko lights blink and Buddhist demons scramble over the rocks in front of Neptune riding a catfish. 

In back, the palace dissolves into dripping stalactites and an electronic waterfall—a Romantic grotto as birth canal. Or is it a butsudan (household altar)? A dancing couple, mating dogs, digging archeologists, and Jesus—Yokoo's personal gods—perch atop stalagmites like little trophies. 

Baroque churches awed parishioners with excessive ornamentation illustrating a cosmic order. Yokoo's weird concoction of gods, galaxies, sex and celebrity is more personal, but no less dazzling. It's sure to win converts.

The Tadanori Yokoo: All Things in the Universe exhibition was held Sept-Oct 2002 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MoT) in Kiba, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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