Japanese Contemporary Art (FOCUS: TADANORI YOKOO)
JAPANESE CONTEMPORARY ART
FOCUS: TADANORI YOKOO
Tadanori Yokoo is Japan’s most iconic graphic designer and contemporary poster artist of the 20th century. Born in 1936, Yokoo’s prolific output between the 1960s and early 2000s includes over 800 poster designs—many created in extremely limited print runs, often fewer than 100 copies. Today, many of these works are so rare that only 10 to 20 copies are known to survive worldwide.
Originally designed as commercial advertisements—for theater, exhibitions, and events—Yokoo’s posters were never intended to be preserved. They were made to be displayed briefly and discarded, which makes surviving originals incredibly rare and highly collectible.
Yokoo’s revolutionary visual style fuses traditional Japanese imagery with psychedelic color, surrealist collage, pop culture, political commentary, and spiritual symbolism. His works have been exhibited at institutions like MoMA (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, and remain internationally acclaimed.
Alongside Yokoo, our gallery features important works from other Japanese graphic masters such as Aquirax Uno, Kiyoshi Awazu, and Seiichi Hayashi—visionary artists who helped define Japan’s avant-garde poster movement from the 1960s onward.
Our focus is on showcasing the most visually striking and historically significant graphic design posters produced in Japan over the last half-century.
Browse the collection. Ask us anything. These are posters you won’t find anywhere else.
