Early Silkscreens 1965-1971 — exhibition cover image

This image served as the cover representation for Early Silkscreens 1965–1971, a survey concentrated on Yokoo's most concentrated period of silkscreen poster production. The selected work is characteristic of the pieces made between his departure from the Nippon Design Center and the personal reorientation that followed the 1981 Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Compositionally the chosen image carries the recurring features of this phase: a rising-sun disc in saturated vermilion, photo-collaged portraiture transferred through commercial halftone screens, decorative cartouches lifted from Meiji-period printed ephemera, and dense hand-set or hand-drawn typography crowding the picture plane. The print was pulled by commercial silkscreen rather than traditional woodblock, but the iconographic stock — Mount Fuji, cresting waves quoting Hokusai, theatrical bijin figures — connects Yokoo's commercial graphic practice directly to the ukiyo-e tradition. The image circulates in the literature of Hanga Jungle (Kokushokankokai, 2018) edited by Noi Sawaragi.