Cross

A 2022 lithograph on cotton paper combining aluminium-plate drawing with photocopy transfer, Cross brings a photographic register into Yokoo's lithographic practice. Photocopy transfer lays a toner image directly onto the printing plate, where it is chemically processed and then pulled like a hand-drawn lithograph; the result fuses the indexical quality of photography with the granular ink-on-paper presence of plate work. The cross motif itself — read variously as religious form, structural mark, or cancellation — sits comfortably within Yokoo's vocabulary of partial signs and residues. Cotton paper is a deliberate choice: heavier and more textured than the washi associated with traditional mokuhanga, it absorbs the layered ink without buckling and gives the transferred image a slightly muted, matte register. Cross is part of the body of cotton-paper transfer prints made between his Australian and Japanese phases, when his lithographic practice was opening toward installation and toward the layered, photographic source imagery that would inform later editions.