Tadanori Yokoo (1936–) is a one-of-a-kind painter who continues to add to his oeuvre with a prodigious variety of themes, styles, and techniques. Early on, he garnered international recognition through exhibitions like his solo show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1972. In recent years his seemingly endless font of unparalleled creative output has won attention in its own right.
In the spring of 2023, Yokoo began a new series that belies his own dispassionate acceptance of the limitations of an aging body. His title for these large canvases, painted without preconceived themes, is Renga, spelled with Kanji characters meaning “linked paintings,” a play on the homonymous term for linked verse. With traditional renga, multiple poets would take turns composing verses in the classical Japanese waka format. Emulating this sequential approach to collaborative creation, Yokoo would view his previous day’s effort as if it were painted by a stranger and use it as inspiration for his work today—which in turn was to serve as inspiration for the stranger that would be himself tomorrow. He finds pleasure, he says, in the unanticipated results of this collaboration with himself.
At some point it occurred to Yokoo that this “renga” process is much like the flow of a river. And indeed, the idea has its origins in a commemorative photograph taken on a riverbank.
Snapped in 1970 by Kishin Shinoyama (1940–2024), the photo shows Yokoo with his classmates by a river in his hometown of Nishiwaki in Hyogo Prefecture. Twenty-two years later, it appeared in the biographical photo book Tadanori Yokoo: Retrospective Scenogaphy. The book’s introduction, by Yukio Mishima (1925–1970), featured the writer’s thoughts on the artist.
This same photograph served as the inspiration for Yokoo’s large 1994 painting A Requiem of Memory (collection of the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art). Three decades later, that work now serves as the starting point of this catalogue. It is followed by sixty-four new works featuring images that derive from diverse sources—that first commemorative photograph, utterly unrelated group portraits found in newspaper advertisements and the like, stories and famous artworks themed on rivers and water, and more.
Commemorative photos suggest an eventual reunion with those who have passed on. In many cultures, rivers have long symbolized the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead. Today, Yokoo’s oeuvre appears before us like a great, gently rolling river. Images emerge and submerge, evoking a sense of nostalgia even when we have never seen them before—and sometimes, striking us as a bit fearsome. The River of Renga rolls on, swallowing up life and death in equal proportion.
Tadanori Yokoo: River of Renga offers a comprehensive portrait, through new oil paintings as well as sketches, of the artist at age eighty-eight.
In the spring of 2023, Yokoo began a new series that belies his own dispassionate acceptance of the limitations of an aging body. His title for these large canvases, painted without preconceived themes, is Renga, spelled with Kanji characters meaning “linked paintings,” a play on the homonymous term for linked verse. With traditional renga, multiple poets would take turns composing verses in the classical Japanese waka format. Emulating this sequential approach to collaborative creation, Yokoo would view his previous day’s effort as if it were painted by a stranger and use it as inspiration for his work today—which in turn was to serve as inspiration for the stranger that would be himself tomorrow. He finds pleasure, he says, in the unanticipated results of this collaboration with himself.
At some point it occurred to Yokoo that this “renga” process is much like the flow of a river. And indeed, the idea has its origins in a commemorative photograph taken on a riverbank.
Snapped in 1970 by Kishin Shinoyama (1940–2024), the photo shows Yokoo with his classmates by a river in his hometown of Nishiwaki in Hyogo Prefecture. Twenty-two years later, it appeared in the biographical photo book Tadanori Yokoo: Retrospective Scenogaphy. The book’s introduction, by Yukio Mishima (1925–1970), featured the writer’s thoughts on the artist.
This same photograph served as the inspiration for Yokoo’s large 1994 painting A Requiem of Memory (collection of the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art). Three decades later, that work now serves as the starting point of this catalogue. It is followed by sixty-four new works featuring images that derive from diverse sources—that first commemorative photograph, utterly unrelated group portraits found in newspaper advertisements and the like, stories and famous artworks themed on rivers and water, and more.
Commemorative photos suggest an eventual reunion with those who have passed on. In many cultures, rivers have long symbolized the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead. Today, Yokoo’s oeuvre appears before us like a great, gently rolling river. Images emerge and submerge, evoking a sense of nostalgia even when we have never seen them before—and sometimes, striking us as a bit fearsome. The River of Renga rolls on, swallowing up life and death in equal proportion.
Tadanori Yokoo: River of Renga offers a comprehensive portrait, through new oil paintings as well as sketches, of the artist at age eighty-eight.
