Tadanori Yokoo

Tadanori Yokoo was born in 1936 in Nishiwaki, a small city in Hyogo prefecture west of Kobe. He started at the Kobe Shimbun newspaper at twenty as an illustrator and layout artist, moved to Tokyo in 1960 and joined the Nippon Design Center — the same founding studio that launched Yusaku Kamekura and Ikko Tanaka.

He left in 1964 to work independently. Over the next ten years he built himself into the defining Japanese poster designer of the decade through sustained commissions for the avant-garde theatre companies Jokyo Gekijo (Shuji Terayama) and Hakutobo (Tatsumi Hijikata), and through a stream of provocative self-portrait pieces that used his own face, the rising-sun motif and layered collage as a consistent visual signature. In 1972 the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a solo exhibition of his graphic work — the first ever given to a Japanese graphic designer at MoMA — organised by Mildred Constantine. Yokoo produced the exhibition poster himself to help fund the show.

The Issey Miyake collaboration began in 1971 when Yokoo attended a Miyake show at Japan Society in New York. From 1977 he designed Miyake’s Paris Collection invitations twice a year; the arrangement ran until 1999, producing over forty invitation pieces and keeping Yokoo’s visual language inside the international fashion calendar.

In 1981 Yokoo announced he was leaving graphic design to concentrate on painting, prompted by a Picasso retrospective at MoMA. He has largely held to that since, though his design and fine-art practice have always overlapped. The Tadanori Yokoo Museum of Contemporary Art opened in Kobe in 2012. He was awarded the Praemium Imperiale in 2015.

Yokoo’s working method is collage — literal, physical, multi-layered, maximalist. Rising-sun flags, ukiyo-e quotations, advertising cut-outs, religious iconography and his own photographed face appear in combinations that carry no single stable reading. The posters refuse to resolve into one message, and the refusal is the point.

His own account is that he designs from instinct rather than programme. He has been clear that the Swiss-school modernist rule-set — the grid, the sans-serif, the reduction — felt to him like a refusal of Japanese pictorial tradition, and that his project was to refuse that refusal.

That position put him in direct counterpoint to the Nippon Design Center modernism of Kamekura and early Tanaka, and made him a founding figure of what Western historians later called Japanese postmodernism. His reference points were ukiyo-e woodblock printing, Shinto iconography, American pop art and the avant-garde theatre for which he made most of his early work.