Takuro Yokoo

Takuro Yokoo (横尾拓郎), who also works under the artist name TAKU, is a Japanese contemporary printmaker and interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers on lithography while extending into installation, mokuhanga, and site-responsive projects. Despite the surname collision with the well-known graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo, Takuro Yokoo is a separate artist of his own generation, and his work locates itself in a quieter, more ruminative register concerned with bodily memory, ambiguous boundaries, and the act of tracing.

Yokoo trained on two continents. He earned a Bachelor of Design from Tokyo Polytechnic University in 2009, followed by a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne in 2018. The Australian period turned out to be formative for his print practice: at the conclusion of his BFA he received the Majlis Encouragement Awards at the Victorian College of the Arts Visual Art Graduate Exhibition (2018), and shortly afterward he was awarded the 1st Prize Awagami Paper Award at the inaugural Australian Open Mokuhanga Exhibition (2017), which connected him to the international mokuhanga community as well as to Japanese washi-paper traditions.

Returning to Japan, Yokoo joined the Printmaking Department of Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai) as a Research Assistant from 2019 to 2023, was promoted to Research Fellow in 2023–2024, and now serves as Lithography Technical Instructor in the same department from 2024 onwards. In parallel, in 2025 he became Lithography Instructor at the Citizens' Atelier of the Yokohama Museum of Art, where he runs courses for the museum's general public lithography programme. The dual appointments at Geidai and Yokohama position him as an active steward of stone- and aluminium-plate lithography in two of Japan's most prominent public-art institutions.

Yokoo's own work moves between flat-edition prints and installations. He describes his practice as engaging the relationship between body and place, memory, and language, looking for the small traces and ambiguous boundaries that accumulate quietly in everyday space. His method relies on horizontal and repetitive bodily movements that trace and soften the edges of structures we usually perceive as fixed — walls, fences, divisions in domestic interiors. The lithographs that emerge are layered with photo-plate and chine-collé elements; many are quite large, with multi-plate works such as 'Four Houses' (2017) extending almost five and a half metres across, while smaller series like 'Roadworks (Yanaka)' (2025) examine localized urban texture at intimate scale. The 'Our Implications' series, conceived during a 2024 residency in Minami Shimabara, Nagasaki, presents lithographs as flag forms inside frames built from abandoned cleaning tools, and uses local sunset-coloured gradients to layer overlapping symbols — torii gates, crosses, and the six coins of Kakure Kirishitan and Sanada Rokumonsen — in a meditation on how identical objects accumulate divergent political and spiritual meanings depending on context.