"TADANORI YOKOO × MARVEL – WE ARE MARVEL FAN CLUB EXHIBITION (Spider-Man / Spider-Girl)", Japanese Contemporary Art Poster, Original Silk Screen 2003, Ultra Rare, Museum-Framed, B1 Poster Size (c.102.9 × 72.8cm)
*Please note the price is fixed for this item. It is not included in any of our periodic sales (e.g. Black Friday)!*
This is an original Japanese silkscreen poster created by Tadanori Yokoo in 2003 for the WE ARE MARVEL FAN CLUB EXHIBITION, held at PARCO in Tokyo from 13 December 2003 to 5 January 2004. The exhibition title, dates and original Marvel Fan Club web address are incorporated directly into the composition.
This is not fan art, a later tribute or an unofficial reproduction. It is Yokoo’s original exhibition image for an official Japanese Marvel event: an extraordinary cultural encounter between one of Japan’s most important post-war artists and the American comic-book universe of Spider-Man.
The work is officially catalogued by The National Museum of Art, Osaka under the title WE ARE MARVEL FAN CLUB EXHIBITION (Parco). The museum records it as a 2003 silkscreen on paper measuring 102.9 × 72.8cm, accession number 80875. Its institutional classification is “Design”, underlining its status as an original exhibition poster rather than a conventional signed and numbered fine-art edition.
The museum’s impression was included in The Complete Posters of Tadanori Yokoo at The National Museum of Art, Osaka in 2010, catalogue number 03-10, where it was reproduced in colour. The design was subsequently included in The Best 450 Posters of Tadanori Yokoo at the Museum of Modern Art, Toyama in 2011.
The National Museum of Art, Osaka
Marvel × Yokoo: Spider-Man Reimagined through Ukiyo-e
This is one of Yokoo’s most extraordinary and improbable cultural crossovers. American comic-book superheroes are transplanted into a distinctly Japanese interior and landscape: Spider-Girl reclines beside a porcelain cup and hanging cloth, while Spider-Man climbs through the wooden lattice outside. A white cat sits with its back to the viewer, Mount Fuji rises in the distance and tiny figures move through the expansive green landscape below.
The scene is surrounded by red vertical cartouches identifying SPIDER-MAN, SPIDER-GIRL and TADANORI YOKOO. Repeated gold and orange spiders spread across the interior, while the yellow-and-red ornament running down the left edge creates a flamboyant decorative border. Yokoo’s intense red, blue, yellow and black palette brings the visual force of American comics into direct contact with the flattened perspective and decorative structure of Japanese woodblock printing.
More than a general ukiyo-e influence, the composition is a knowing contemporary reworking of Utagawa Hiroshige’s 1857 woodblock print Asakusa Ricefields and Torinomachi Festival, number 101 from the celebrated series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.
The correspondences are remarkably precise. Yokoo retains Hiroshige’s:
- Tall lattice-framed view from an upper-storey interior
- White cat sitting on the sill with its back to the viewer
- Cup and casually hanging cloth at the right
- Small cluster of hair ornaments at the lower left
- Extensive rice fields and distant procession
- Mount Fuji rising beyond the landscape
- Blue-to-pale-to-red gradation of the sky
Hiroshige’s original depicts the view from a room in the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter on the day of the Torinomachi Festival. The woman occupying the room remains unseen, but her presence is suggested through the cat and personal belongings. Yokoo makes that absent female presence spectacularly visible by introducing the figure identified on the poster as SPIDER-GIRL, while Spider-Man invades the exterior beyond the lattice.
The result is far more sophisticated than simply placing superheroes in a Japanese setting. Yokoo reconstructs Hiroshige’s intimate Edo-period composition in large-scale silkscreen, preserves its most distinctive narrative details and then allows Marvel’s characters to enter the scene. It becomes an exhilarating collision of ukiyo-e, American comic-book Pop, Japanese advertising design and Yokoo’s own unmistakable visual language.
Hiroshige’s original composition – Brooklyn Museum
Hiroshige’s original composition – British Museum
The Sand-Like, Light-Catching Eyes
One of this poster’s most remarkable physical details is almost impossible to appreciate in an ordinary photograph.
The eyes of both Spider-Man and Spider-Girl are not printed as flat white areas. They carry a dense, silver-white, light-reflective specialty layer with a coarse, granular surface. It has an almost sand-like or crystalline appearance and catches and scatters light as the viewing angle changes, causing the eyes to glisten dramatically against the otherwise matte red-and-black masks.
The detailed close-up photographs clearly show this sparkling, tactile surface. The treatment appears even, brilliant and exceptionally well preserved on both characters. It gives their eyes an almost jewel-like presence and adds a physical dimension that cannot be reproduced by an offset copy, digital print or photograph.
This unusual specialty treatment is one of the poster’s most distinctive features and demonstrates how carefully the original silkscreen was conceived as a physical object.
Silkscreen Technique and Surface
Silkscreen was the ideal medium for Yokoo’s transformation of Hiroshige. Traditional multicolour ukiyo-e is constructed through successive carved woodblocks, while silkscreen uses separate stencils and layers of ink. The processes are technically different, but both depend upon colour separation, superimposed layers and the interaction of sharply defined flat fields.
Throughout the sheet, Yokoo exploits the material range of silkscreen through:
- Saturated, opaque reds, blues, yellows and blacks
- Forceful black outlines recalling both comic-book inking and woodblock keylines
- Controlled tonal gradations in the sky and water
- Coarse stippling throughout the fields, trees and interior floor
- Layered colour separations that create a visibly printed surface
- The contrasting granular, light-reflective treatment of the characters’ eyes
The landscape is constructed from dense fields of printed marks rather than photographic detail. The black keylines have a deliberate roughness, while the broad areas of colour remain deep and emphatic. Against these predominantly matte passages, the sparkling eyes become especially striking.
This contrast between flat colour, stippled texture, glossy passages and granular reflective ink gives the original print a presence that ordinary photography cannot fully communicate.
Exceptional Rarity
No published edition size has been located for this poster. Many of Yokoo’s signed fine-art silkscreens were issued in editions of approximately one hundred. This was produced as an exhibition poster, and neither the institutional catalogue record nor the poster itself states an edition size.
We have not located a publicly indexed standalone auction result for another full-size original impression - in any Japanese or Western Auction. Among the institutional and market records examined, the only other publicly documented full-size impression located was the example in The National Museum of Art, Osaka.
This does not prove that only two impressions survive. It does, however, demonstrate the exceptional scarcity of publicly documented examples and the almost complete absence of this poster from the international secondary market.
Unlike Yokoo’s best-known 1960s theatre posters, which appear regularly in books and occasionally at auction, this later Marvel composition has remained remarkably obscure despite its spectacular subject, monumental B1 format and museum documentation.
Japan Poster Shop maintains a substantial collection of original Tadanori Yokoo posters and has handled many uncommon examples from across the artist’s career. Despite this experience, this is the first full-size original impression of the Yokoo–Marvel design that we have encountered.
Condition and Presentation
This particular impression is in excellent + condition.
The colours remain exceptionally strong, saturated and unfaded. The red, blue, yellow, green and black inks retain their original intensity, while the granular reflective layer in the characters’ eyes remains bright and evenly preserved.
The detailed photographs show the exact sheet both front and back. The unprinted reverse is remarkably clean. Slight natural paper undulation can be seen under directional light when the unframed sheet is photographed, as expected with a large silkscreen on paper, but this does not detract from its exceptional overall presentation.
The poster was temporarily removed from its frame so that the front, edges, surface and reverse could be photographed in detail. It will be supplied professionally framed to museum standards.
Please refer carefully to all imagery, including the complete front, blank reverse and detailed close-ups, as this is the exact poster that is for sale.
It is more than 23 years old.
It is not a reproduction or a reprint.
Certificate of Authenticity included.
