"TADANORI YOKOO - Designing a Life: Miyake by Yokoo", Japanese Contemporary Art Poster, Offset, Original Release 1985, B2 Size (51 x 73cm)

Original Offset Print on Paper, B2 Size (51 × 73 cm)
As issued for the Designing a Life: Miyake by Yokoo Exhibition at the Okayama City Museum of Art, Japan (1985)

This is an original 1985 offset poster by Japanese graphic art icon Tadanori Yokoo, designed to promote the collaborative exhibition Designing a Life: Miyake by Yokoo, which explored the radical synergy between Yokoo and fashion visionary Issey Miyake. The design is directly derived from Yokoo’s Bodyworks campaign for Miyake’s Autumn/Winter 1985–86 collection, one of the most avant-garde visual identities in Japanese fashion history.

Executed in moody black ink, the central image is a symmetrical inkblot-style portrait that mirrors and multiplies a masculine face—presumed to be that of designer Issey Miyake. The mirrored repetition evokes psychological depth, referencing Rorschach tests and introspective duality. Each eye seems to gaze inward, while also challenging the viewer's gaze. The ink wash gives the face a ghostly weightlessness, juxtaposed with sharp red text typeset along all four edges in vertical and horizontal orientations.

The typographic interplay includes bilingual (Japanese and French) elements, referencing both the domestic significance of Miyake’s work and its international acclaim. Exhibition and fashion show dates, times, and venues are woven into the visual field—not as afterthoughts, but as integral graphic elements. Yokoo blurs the boundary between promotion and conceptual design.

Though mechanically printed, the poster bears a hand-wrought immediacy. The offset process captures every nuance of Yokoo’s expressive brushwork and layered typographic play. It bridges fashion, art, and identity performance—core to both Miyake’s design ethos and Yokoo’s pop-surrealist sensibility.

This poster was printed in 1985 for the Designing a Life exhibition at the Okayama City Museum of Art and is closely related to the Bodyworks campaign that Miyake presented in Paris. Though never officially reissued, it remains a foundational artifact of cross-disciplinary Japanese design and a key moment in Yokoo’s career as a graphic interpreter of cultural visionaries.

Preserved in excellent condition, this is a rare opportunity to acquire a piece that embodies the 1980s peak of Japanese postmodern collaboration—where fashion met philosophy, and art became life.

This poster is in excellent condition. Please refer to the imagery (both front and back) as this is the exact poster that is for sale. 

It is not a reproduction or a reprint.

Certificate of Authenticity included.