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.
Mr. Yokoo’s Palette
Japan
Kobe
2022
19
Mr. Yokoo’s Palette showcases artist Yokoo Tadanori’s striking use of color, tracing his vibrant painting career since his “painter’s declaration” in the early 1980s. This pivotal moment marked his shift from graphic design to a prolific period of pictorial experiments, creating diverse works without fixed subjects or styles. The exhibition uniquely reorganizes his artistic world by categorizing paintings from series like Pink Girl and Y-junction based on their dominant hues, transforming the museum galleries into a grand palette. Visitors will discover background materials, including actual used palettes and paints from his studio, offering a glimpse into his creative process. This presentation invites reflection on the overwhelming power of Yokoo’s colors and how a singular artistic element can define an entire body of work, offering a fresh perspective on his timeless vision.
Why should you watch this?
The film Mr. Yokoo’s Palette is urgently relevant now because it shows how color reshapes perception when attention fragments across screens and crises. By arranging Yokoo’s paintings by hue and treating the galleries as a single palette, the film links his post-1980s experiments to present hopes for repair and renewed attention. Scenes like the volcanic red of Pink Girl and the quiet close-ups of Yokoo’s stained studio palettes offer both sensory exhilaration and documentary intimacy. That mix of visual shock and reflective evidence prompts wonder and thought, leaving viewers with a clear takeaway: learning to read color helps us see and respond more deeply to the world.
Forward to the Past: Yokoo Tadanori’s Road to Hanshan and Shide
Japan
Kobe
2022
17
The exhibition Forward to the Past: Yokoo Tadanori’s Road to Hanshan and Shide presents artist Yokoo Tadanori’s compelling new paintings, inspired by the Tang-dynasty (618-907 CE) Zen monks Hanshan and Shide, alongside key works from his extensive artistic journey. Responding to the profound global shifts beginning in 2020, Yokoo retreated to his studio, developing his “moro-tai” (obscure style) to portray Hanshan and Shide, celebrated for their tousled hair, ragged clothes, and hearty laughter. This collection reveals how an artist’s personal introspection during times of societal change can lead to an unexpected connection with historical figures and artistic renewal, inviting visitors to consider the enduring power of creative resilience across ages.
Why should you watch this?
The film Forward to the Past: Yokoo Tadanori’s Road to Hanshan and Shide is timely because it shows how an artist’s practice can turn isolation into a public language of resilience and wit. Yokoo’s loose moro-tai brushwork reimagines Tang-era misfits as companions for our own fraught moment—ragged clothes and hearty laughter become forms of resistance. A trembling contour that bursts into a grin, or a pale wash that reads like a private confession, mixes unease with solace. The experience challenges and comforts in equal measure, leaving a simple charge: art can hold loss, reopen stories, and invite renewed care for one another.
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.
Yokoo Tadanori Collection Gallery 2021
Japan
Kobe
2021
13
The Yokoo Tadanori Collection Gallery presents a comprehensive view of the artistic world and deep influences shaping the practice of Japanese artist Yokoo Tadanori. This permanent space, established in 2021 within the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, displays his original drawings, color proofs, and project designs. The collection offers insight into the cultural and historical contexts that fed Yokoo’s aesthetic, illuminating the wider network of artistic references he engaged with. Visitors can study archive materials and works by figures he admired, such as Francis Picabia and Giorgio de Chirico, revealing the sources that informed his output. The gallery ultimately encourages visitors to recognize the enduring dialogue between personal vision and international creative lineage that defines lasting contemporary art.
Why should you watch this?
The Yokoo Tadanori Collection Gallery reveals the surprising connections between Yokoo’s imaginative designs and the works of artists he admired, such as Picabia and de Chirico, showing how ideas travel across time and place. Scenes capturing his bold color proofs alongside delicate sketches create moments of both delight and contemplation, exposing the processes behind visual invention. By following the intersections of personal creativity and broader artistic currents, the film invites viewers to experience the thrill of discovery and recognize how enduring inspiration emerges from unexpected juxtapositions, offering a vivid reminder of the vitality of art across generations.
Eloquent Simplicity in Wood and Fiber
X
X
2012
13
Eloquent Simplicity in Wood and Fiber is an exhibition exploring the versatility of natural materials, presenting sculptural forms and functional objects that blend traditional expression with contemporary design. The display defines the distinct aesthetic sensibilities of the Cordillera Mountain groups, including the Ifugao and Kalinga, who have long used wood and fiber to create objects for both utilitarian and ritual purposes. Juxtaposed against these traditional items, the exhibition features contemporary works by notable voices like National Artist Napoleon Abueva and designer Claude Tayag, who utilize Philippine hardwoods such as narra and molave. Addressing the modern scarcity of natural resources, the project highlights how artists continue to create meaningful, practical objects. This presentation encourages visitors to appreciate the enduring beauty, tactile quality, and profound functionality inherent in the world’s simplest materials.
Why should you watch this?
Eloquent Simplicity in Wood and Fiber illuminates how human creativity transforms humble natural materials into objects of enduring beauty and purpose. By placing traditional Cordillera pieces alongside contemporary works by Napoleon Abueva and Claude Tayag, the exhibition highlights the dialogue between ancestral craft and modern design, revealing the ways material, hand, and intention shape culture across generations. Visitors are drawn to striking details — the flowing curves of a carved molave bowl, the clarity of a geometric wooden sculpture — that invite touch, reflection, and wonder. In the process, it underscores a timeless human connection to nature, craftsmanship, and meaningful daily life.
“Rage and Desire — The Beating Heart of Men” by photographer Gérard Rancinan and writer Caroline Gaudriault
Morocco
Rabat
2021
11
This exhibition, Of Rage and Desire, The Beating Heart of Men, presents a unique photographic and literary confrontation exploring the state of humanity in the modern era. Conceived by international photographer Gérard Rancinan and French author Caroline Gaudriault, the project uses monumental imagery and reflective texts to critically examine the profound social contradictions and transformations that have defined life in the 20th and 21st centuries. The display features Rancinan’s striking, metaphor-rich photographs, which often reinterpret classic masterpieces, alongside Gaudriault’s powerful calligraphic installations. Organized into three immersive parts, the exhibition charts our complex relationship with Modernity and societal upheaval. Visitors leave having considered the full range of human feeling — our hopes, rages, desires, and responsibilities — within the continuous transformation of the global world.
Why should you watch this?
The film Of Rage and Desire, The Beating Heart of Men speaks directly to our fractured present by pairing Gérard Rancinan’s monumental, often operatic photographs with Caroline Gaudriault’s hand-written texts, forcing a conversation between image and language about power, longing, and social fracture. Moments such as a staged tableau that echoes a classical masterpiece and a nearby wall of looping calligraphy confront viewers with feeling and argument at once — beautiful, unsettling, and hard to look away from. The effect is both visceral and cerebral: it provokes anger, invites reflection, and asks a final responsibility of us all — to name what we want and what we must change.