Cycles of Repetition | TABlog | Tokyo Art Beat

You are confronted by a topless woman, the two bold black patches of hair sleeping in her armpits. She leans back proudly, oblivious, hands behind her head, wearing thigh-high corn blue stockings and lavish gold jewelry. Above her stands a gondolier-like figure, watching her coldly and pushing her sinking wooden boat deeper into the red water with his pole. Geometrically, the rudder of his boat is in fact a penis, silently ejaculating over the lower portion of the painting. This is Un Bateau Ivre, painted in a sloppy but bold graphic style on a canvas almost 1.5m tall, this is the first image to greet you in this exhibition.

Most people are familiar with Yokoo’s graphic design work, primarily his iconic posters of the 1960s and 1970s, which can be found in modern art museums around the world. Labeled as Japan’s Andy Warhol, he has been credited with being the one graphic artist who best captured the ’60s spiritual Zeitgeist.¹ However, much less attention has been paid to his work as a painter. A graphic artist with a strong and personal vision, he began pursuing painting in 1981, feeling that it offered more freedom than graphic design. Eventually in 2007 he declared he would give up commercial graphic design work completely because “graphic design is business” but painting, creating art, “is life”.

Almost all of the works in this exhibition have been produced within the last few years, but it is one much earlier painting When truth comes to truth, painted in 1994, that holds the visual key to the rest of the show. It is the source of the exhibition’s strongest, recurring motif: the topless woman, reclining in her wooden boat, oblivious to the world around her. Topless and unfortunate looking pin-up models, an imposing magician and wooden rowboats also repeat throughout the works on display. However, while there is a clear visual connection between these works, it does not seem that the artist achieved these images through a progression of one work leading to another, rather that these elements were all preformed in his mind, only to be unleashed in a short period of time, over several canvases. In one instance, the repetition is complete: the painting Thief of Beauty contains a complete replication of another painting, Atypicalness.

With their towering ghostly figures, public baths filled with cartoonish naked women, one of whom is glowing and sat in a rowboat being used to rescue a drowning man, and even repeated written messages mentioning Rene Magritte’s name in two of the paintings, these dreamlike works have an air of Surrealism to them. However, it would be too easy to categorize them into this dated genre. Yokoo himself claims to have no agenda behind his paintings: when he paints he does so by “excluding means, purposes and aims” so that “only freedom remains.”² However, if this is his aim, I felt he was not always successful. At times the imagery comes across as strange for the sake of being strange: an out-of-place rabbit, jumping through water churned by sharks, and pastiche elements, numbered rocks and haphazardly placed punctuation symbols, collaged photos and images from magazines are clichés that seem to link the paintings closer to Surrealism than to the artist’s stated aspirations.

Perhaps it would be apt to think of Tadanori Yokoo as a ‘medium’, a human conduit of images, recording them as they appear and reappear. We may all be capable of recording our own stream of consciousness in some form or another, but what makes Yokoo different and special is his determination and confidence in reconstructing these images. His paintings are the work of a person collaging the visuals of their dreams, without much critique or worry about their psychological source. This exhibition is thus a very engaging display of unanswered questions.

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¹ The Art Directors Club, ‘Biography of Tadanori Yokoo’, http://www.adcglobal.org/archive/hof/2000/?id=205, accessed on March 16th, 2008.
² Matsuda, Yuki, (2008), ‘Tadanori Yokoo as the God of Japanese pop culture’, http://blog.aktualne.centrum.cz/blogy/yuki-masuda.php?itemid=2831, accessed on March 16th, 2008.