Yokoo Tadanori’s Game of Life
Japan
Kobe
2025
18
Yokoo Tadanori’s Game of Life transforms the artist’s remarkable journey into an interactive board game, inviting visitors to experience his extensive artistic world firsthand. Born in 1936, Yokoo Tadanori has navigated a career spanning decades, marked by a philosophy that embraces destiny and chance. The exhibition explores how his art reflects life’s unpredictable path, where outcomes are often left to fate, much like reaching the “Finish” square in a game. Through this engaging format, featuring the visionary artist’s work, the exhibition encourages reflection on the interplay of choice and fortune in shaping creative expression and individual trajectories. Visitors will gain a fresh perspective on his unique artistic vision and the unpredictable nature of life itself.
Why should you watch this?
The film Yokoo Tadanori’s Game of Life feels urgent now because it frames existence as both play and chance, echoing the uncertainty of our own times. Yokoo’s use of the board game format highlights how life’s path is shaped as much by accident as by intention, a theme that resonates in an era of shifting global realities. Moving between moments of triumph, setback, and surprise, the exhibition transforms autobiography into a shared reflection on fate. The playful roll of the dice becomes a metaphor for resilience, leaving viewers with a reminder that unpredictability is not chaos but a condition of living.
Requiem: Cats, Portraits, and Yokoo Tadanori
Japan
Kobe
2024
17
Requiem: Cats, Portraits explores artist Yokoo Tadanori’s profound connections with departed friends, family, and beloved cats, tracing his influential career from the 1960s to the present. Born in 1936, Yokoo’s artistic journey has always been shaped by deep personal relationships and collaborative endeavors across various creative fields. The exhibition features portraits and personal statements, alongside items like the Tama, Come Home series, dedicated to his late cat. Visitors will also see examples of his enduring friendship with designer Issey Miyake, including iconic invitation designs from the 1970s onwards. This unique presentation invites viewers to reflect on how cherished relationships transcend time, influencing an artist’s vision and offering a glimpse into a timeless “Yokoo World.”
Why should you watch this?
The film Requiem: Cats, Portraits speaks to the need to keep memories alive in a time when loss touches many lives. Yokoo Tadanori’s portraits of friends, family, and his late cat Tama are not only records of affection but also reminders of how relationships shape creative vision. The display of Issey Miyake’s invitations alongside Yokoo’s drawings captures the energy of a friendship that spanned decades, showing how personal ties can fuel artistic innovation. Moving between private recollection and shared cultural history, the work invites viewers to consider how love, grief, and memory continue to shape the world we inhabit.
Yokoo Tadanori: 100 Takes of Hanshan and Shide
Japan
Kobe
2024
2020
100 Takes of Hanshan and Shide presents artist Yokoo Tadanori’s series of 102 paintings, reinterpreting figures from China’s Tang dynasty. Hanshan and Shide, eccentric poets believed to be bodhisattvas, have inspired artists for centuries with their enduring mystery. Yokoo found them an ideal image, projecting them onto diverse scenes like ukiyo-e-style women and marathon runners, a quest begun with his interpretation of Soga Shohaku. This exhibition reveals Yokoo’s sustained creative power after forty years, connecting ancient legends with contemporary art. Visitors will reflect on the timeless interplay between myth and artistic vision, appreciating how one artist continually reshapes enduring narratives.
Why should you watch this?
The film 100 Takes of Hanshan and Shide speaks to our moment by showing how myth and misrule become tools for thinking about continuity and change. Yokoo’s decision to paint 102 versions — placing ragged, poetic figures beside ukiyo-e women, Belorussian lovers, and marathon runners — stretches time and tests who belongs in stories we keep. Some images shock: Hanshan laughing in garish color or Shide pacing through a crowd of runners; others disarm with tenderness. The work feels at once playful and provocative, inviting viewers to reconsider tradition as a living practice and to carry forward compassion and imagination into uncertain futures.
Yokoo Tadanori: Wow! ★ Y-Junctions
Japan
Kobe
2024
16
Wow! ★ Y-Junctions presents Yokoo Tadanori’s extensive and evolving series, initiated in 2000, which transforms familiar three-way road junctions into profound artistic landscapes. This ambitious project began when Yokoo photographed a night scene in his hometown, revealing unexpected depths in everyday scenery. What started as an introspective world of light and shadow evolved through phases of explosive color, continuously generating new variations. The exhibition highlights this ongoing artistic exploration, featuring works from the series’ early years (2000-2005) and more recent creations from 2016 onwards. Visitors can witness how one artist’s singular vision redefines perception, inviting reflection on the hidden beauty and endless transformations within the commonplace world around us.
Why should you watch this?
The film Wow! ★ Y-Junctions speaks to our moment because it shows how a single flash of perception can turn ordinary streets into places for renewed attention and meaning after collective disruption. Yokoo’s nocturnal photograph of a three-way junction becomes a recurring voice that shifts from penumbral stillness to explosive color, producing scenes both eerie and exhilarating: a lamplit fork that reads like a private memory and a sweep of saturated paint that reads as public joy. These moments unsettle and uplift in equal measure, and the film’s lasting takeaway is clear—close looking can change how we imagine shared life.
Yokoo in Wonderland
Japan
Kobe
2023
19
Yokoo in Wonderland invites visitors into artist Yokoo Tadanori’s parallel realm, where the boundaries of reality dissolve into a collection of wonders. Drawing inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland, the exhibition guides viewers through a journey that begins with a girl falling into an underground kingdom, then continues into space and an unknown world. The experience progresses through “The Looking-Glass World,” where real and virtual images intertwine, and concludes in “The Land of Dreams,” blurring reality and unreality. Through Yokoo’s distinctive artistic vision, this exhibition encourages a deep immersion into an infinitely expanding universe, prompting reflection on how art can transport and reshape our perception of the world.
Why should you watch this?
The film Yokoo in Wonderland resonates now because it stages how our sense of reality unravels and reforms under technological and social pressure. Yokoo’s Alice-like girl — leaping down a hole into an underground kingdom, surfacing beneath seas and in orbit — models curiosity as a way to face dizzying image worlds. The mirror passage, where reflections splice with virtual figures, feels eerily topical in an era of screens and layered identities. The work unsettles and thrills, alternating moments of childlike astonishment with sudden dislocation. Its lasting charge is both simple and urgent: openness to strangeness sharpens perception, and imagination becomes a civic skill for living together.
Yokoo Tadanori: Forest in Soul
Japan
Kobe
2023
17
Yokoo Tadanori: Forest in Soul brings to life the artist’s 2022 novel, Genkyo no mori, transforming its narrative into an immersive exhibition. Yokoo Tadanori, a renowned painter and writer, explores art and life through conversations with 280 departed souls. These figures, from celebrated artists like Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp to personal acquaintances and his beloved cat Tama, profoundly shaped Yokoo’s artistic vision throughout his career. The exhibition’s forest-like setting visually embodies these dialogues, inviting visitors to wander through Yokoo’s imagined world. Guests will discover how timeless influences from diverse realms can inspire creativity, prompting reflection on the enduring connections between existence, artistry, and memory.
Why should you watch this?
The film Forest in Soul speaks urgently to our moment by turning absence into conversation, showing how art sustains communities when memory fragments. Yokoo stages a forest where Y meets 280 departed voices — Picasso and Duchamp one moment, Mishima and Tama the next — so that art, history, and the personal overlap. The effect is at once uncanny and consoling: a circle of vanished figures arguing, joking, and offering stubborn truths that unsettle received stories while nourishing imagination. Moments such as the grand forum of the departed and a whispered exchange with Yokoo’s cat create both wonder and intimacy. The takeaway: listening across time renews how we live and make meaning together.
Yokoo Tadanori’s Haunted Museum
Japan
Kobe
2021
13
Yokoo Tadanori’s Haunted Museum presents a compelling exploration of the intrinsic connection between art and fear, featuring a diverse range of the artist’s works. Yokoo Tadanori has consistently pursued phenomena that remain invisible or unexplainable by science, a fascination rooted in his childhood experiences with profound darkness and mystical encounters in Nishiwaki. This deeply personal history informs much of his art, from his celebrated illustrations for the Complete Works of Edogawa Rampo to his paintings created since his “painter’s declaration.” The exhibition, designed with deliberately darkened spaces, encourages visitors to engage with their own ambivalent emotions of wanting to look yet fearing the unknown. It highlights art’s enduring capacity to interpret and express humanity’s primal responses to mystery and the unseen, fostering a reflection on these universal aspects of human existence.
Why should you watch this?
The film Yokoo Tadanori’s Haunted Museum asks what happens when fear and curiosity meet in the same moment. Drawing on childhood nights of complete darkness and on the unsettling imagery of his Edogawa Rampo illustrations, Yokoo turns the unseen into something you can almost touch. A face appearing out of shadow or a mouth repeated like a chant unsettles, yet also holds you in place. The experience lingers because it reminds us that fear is not only about danger but about discovery, and that learning to face it can change how we see the world.
Klaus Staeck. Sand for the Gears
Germany
Essen
2018
55
Why should you watch this?
Klaus Staeck’s exhibition resonates deeply with contemporary audiences, serving as a powerful reminder of art’s capacity to provoke thought and inspire social change. In an age marked by political polarization and social unrest, Staeck’s nearly 180 posters challenge us to confront uncomfortable truths and reflect on the role of dissent in shaping public discourse. His bold, often scandalous imagery speaks to the importance of artists as catalysts for conversation, urging society to engage with pressing issues such as inequality, identity, and civic responsibility. As we navigate our own crises today, Staeck’s work underscores the timeless relevance of art as a tool for advocacy and a vehicle for sparking new dialogues. This exhibition not only honors a pivotal figure in art history but also invites us to consider how we, too, can use creativity to effect change in our communities.
Haim Sokol. Testimony
Russia
Moscow
2018
90
Haim Sokol’s solo exhibition delves into the intricate interplay of memory and oblivion, offering a poignant exploration of individual narratives amidst historical upheaval. Blending documentary material with artistic expression, Sokol showcases a decade’s worth of work that includes videos in collaboration with migrant workers, a workshop dedicated to the art of protest, and a thought-provoking examination of “paper memory.” The exhibition features a rich tapestry of forms — drawings, performances, installations, and objects crafted from diverse materials such as metal, leather, and plastic — all converging around the central video installation “Testimony,” which poignantly recounts his father’s harrowing experiences in a ghetto during WWII. This compelling collection not only honors those marginalized in history but also ignites crucial conversations about identity, resilience, and the significance of personal testimonies in contemporary art.
Why should you watch this?
The guided tour provides a vital lens through which we can confront and reflect on pressing contemporary issues such as migration, displacement, and the struggle for recognition. In an era marked by increasing xenophobia and political polarization, Sokol’s exploration of marginalized voices and historical amnesia resonates deeply, urging us to confront our collective past and present. The guided tour offers insights that enrich our understanding of how memory shapes identity and informs socio-political discourse, making it particularly relevant as today’s world grapples with the consequences of both historical injustices and ongoing humanitarian crises. Engaging with Sokol’s work through a guided narrative not only enhances appreciation for the artistry involved but also emphasizes the urgency of empathy and awareness in combating societal erasure and advocating for the dignity of all individuals.