Go Yayanagi

Go Yayanagi was a Japanese painter and printmaker who coined the term 'Pop-Uki' to describe his distinctive fusion of pop art energy with the crisp outlines and flat color planes of traditional ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Over a career spanning more than six decades, he created a vibrant body of silkscreens, etchings, paintings, and sculptures that celebrated the natural world with bold graphic power and ecological conviction.

Born Tsuyoshi Yayanagi in 1933 in Obihiro, Hokkaido, he grew up in Japan's northernmost main island, where the landscapes of forest, coast, and agricultural plain would shape his lifelong fascination with animals, birds, and the rhythms of nature. After university studies in Japan, Yayanagi embarked on an extraordinary period of international wandering that took him far from Hokkaido.

In 1957, he left Japan aboard the ship Burajiru-Maru bound for São Paulo, Brazil. He spent years in South America before making his way to Paris in 1965. There he enrolled at Atelier 17, the legendary printmaking workshop founded by Stanley William Hayter, studying copperplate engraving techniques alongside artists from around the world. The experience at Atelier 17 gave Yayanagi technical mastery of etching and intaglio, skills he would carry through the rest of his career.

Returning to Japan, Yayanagi settled in Tokyo and began developing the eclectic, boundary-crossing practice for which he became known. His prints and paintings combined the refined black outlines and flat planes of color associated with ukiyo-e with the bold graphics and cultural irreverence of Western pop art. He coined 'Pop-Uki' as a name for this hybrid approach, and the term captures both his deep roots in Japanese visual tradition and his openness to international contemporary art.

Yayanagi's subjects centered on nature, particularly birds, fish, and other animals, rendered in vibrant silkscreens with clean, refined lines. He also produced etchings, oil paintings, sculptures, stained glass, public murals, and even fashion designs, bringing the same vivid sensibility to every medium he touched.

His work is held in major museum collections worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. He exhibited at galleries including Whitestone Gallery and Kumo Arts, and his prints have been handled by Ronin Gallery in New York.

Yayanagi continued working into his nineties, producing new paintings and silkscreens until near the end of his life. He died in 2025, leaving behind a body of work that brought together East and West, tradition and modernity, in a celebration of the natural world.