From 'The Birth of the Land (Kiki)': R.T.P. (To)

This 1984 screenprint belongs to The Birth of the Land (Kiki) series, in which Takamatsu took as his framing reference the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki — the eighth-century chronicles, collectively known as the Kiki, that recount the mythological formation of the Japanese archipelago. The series treats the founding text not as patriotic content but as a body of language whose authority depends on its own internal structure, with the parenthetical 'To' identifying a specific entity within the chronicle's sequence of divine generations. Compositions in the series typically pair fragments of text, phonetic notation, or diagrammatic marks with abstracted forms that resist mapping onto figurative imagery, so the viewer registers the page as a field of inscription rather than as illustration. By the mid-1980s Takamatsu had moved well beyond the optical investigations of the Perspective and Shadow works of the 1960s into projects that interrogated language, naming, and writing as representational systems in their own right. The screenprint format remains consistent with his long preference for flat, mechanically produced graphic surfaces over the painterly mark.