Tadanori Yokoo is a Japanese graphic designer, illustrator, printmaker and painter. Yokoo's signature style of psychedelia and pastiche engages a wide span of modern visual and cultural phenomena from Japan and around the world.
Tadanori Yokoo, born in Nishiwaki, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, in 1936, is one of Japan's most successful and internationally recognized graphic designers and artists. He began his career as a stage designer for avant garde theatre in Tokyo. His early work shows the influence of the New York-based Push Pin Studio (Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast in particular), but Yokoo cites filmmaker Akira Kurosawa as his most formative influence.
The designer's ambition embarked on at an early age during Yokoo's teenager years, and before moving to Tokyo, he had done graphic design-related works for a period of time for the Chamber of Commerce in Nishiwaki.
At the age of 22, Yokoo won an heritable mention at the Japanese Advertising Artists Club (JAAC) poster exhibition in Tokyo and joined the JAAC, and officially moved to Tokyo around 1960.
The year of 1965 witnessed Yokoo's rising as an eminent young artist in the post-war era. The first work of his to receive popularity, Tadanori Yokoo (1965) was on view at the Persona exhibition, featuring 16 designers and held at Tokyo's Matsuya department store. This self-portrait poster shows the artist as a man who hanged himself, captioned in English with "Made in Japan/Having reached a climax at the age of 29, I was dead."
The lower left shows a cutout of Yokoo's photograph taken at age one and a half and on opposing side we find another cutout placed at the back, showing likely a group photo taken at school during Yokoo's teenage years. The rising sun, the most representative symbol of wartime Japan, dominates the layout. On the upper corners, the Shinkansen on one side and the nuclear bomb on the other, break through Mt. Fuji, another icon of Japan. Yokoo explained, "...with Tadanori Yokoo, these works represented a form of rebirth for me." The poster, on the one hand, was a death statement the artist issued for himself, aiming to break away from his own past. On the other hand, the integration of a bold, collage-like style along with the presence of nationalistic symbols such as the rising sun, Shinkansen, and even Mt. Fuji, Yokoo set out to challenge the state of design, and that of culture and politics at large in post-war Japan. By acting against the Bauhaus-led, abstract design that prevailed Japanese graphic design during the 1960s, Yokoo delivered an audacious deviation that criticized the passive acceptance of Western modernism in Japan and on top of that, the country's rapid economic growth.