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

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

by John McGee

This major retrospective of nearly 400 paintings (plus a few videos and sculptures) confirms that 66-year-old Tadanori Yokoo is the grandfather of Japanese pop. The sometimes graphic designer wields obsession and whimsy with great energy, cramming images from old movies, Old Masters and his various UFO contacts into quirky figure and landscape paintings. 

Tadanori Yokoo, Self Portrait, 1965, 
silkscreen on paper, 103x72.8cm
(Image courtesy the artist)

This show has everything from Yokoo's much admired 1960s-era hippie funk, pink-nude-women-in-landscapes (e.g. Goldie Hawn squeezing her nipple in a Mona Lisa wilderness) to his psychedelic, Coors Beer electronic waterfalls to his masterpiece of kitsch—a scale-model of Rome’s Trevi Fountain crawling with Buddhist demon action figures that, in back, converts into a Romantic grotto as birth canal. Weird and wonderful.

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.

©2006 John McGee

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