Purple Magazine
— Purple #43 S/S 2025
The Tokyo Diary Issue
tadanoori yokoo
text
by ANDRÉ MICHEL
portrait
by CHIKASHI SUZUKI
In 1972, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York held a retrospective of Tadanori Yokoo. At the time, he was only 36, making him one of the youngest artists ever to receive that honor. His work lies at the intersection of traditional Japanese motifs and pop culture, encompassing posters, paintings, album covers, and installations. He remains at the forefront of the Japanese avant-garde, collaborating with iconic figures such as the filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and the writer Yukio Mishima.
Yokoo was born in Nishiwaki, a small city northwest of Osaka, in 1936 and started working in advertising in Kobe when he was 20. He became a highly sought-after graphic designer for posters, book covers, and advertisements. In the 1960s, frustrated with agency work,
he began experimenting with Surrealism, Dada, and Pop Art. He became a major figure of Tokyo’s underground movement while designing covers for The Beatles and Miles Davis. MoMA took notice and included him in the seminal “Word and Image” 1968 exhibition alongside artists like Frank Stella and Andy Warhol.
Yokoo’s style is a mix of traditional ukiyo-e (woodblock prints), Buddhist iconography, and Shinto symbolism with pop stars, neon colors, and industrial landscapes. Famously in 1980, after seeing a Picasso retrospective in New York, he shifted his focus entirely to painting, abandoning all his other practices. Yokoo has never stopped being subversive and trailblazing, and he continues to inspire a whole generation of Japanese artists, such as Takashi Murakami and Yayoi Kusama. Recently, he was one of the rare Asian artists featured in the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s 2024 “Pop Forever” show on the legacy of Pop Art.
