Lighthouse (DNW)

Lighthouse (DNW) takes a coastal navigation marker as its subject, almost certainly drawn from the Australian coastline near Melbourne where Yokoo was studying at the Victorian College of the Arts at the time. The parenthetical DNW is a printer's state notation rather than a place name — printmakers commonly annotate trial proofs this way — and the work sits among the experimental aluminium-plate lithographs that preceded his more resolved cotton-paper editions. The lighthouse motif lends itself to the medium's tonal range: a dense tower against open sky, the gradient of weather, the lamp housing reading as a small architectural mass. For Yokoo, whose practice circles around boundaries and thresholds — between bodies, between countries, between memory and image — a lighthouse is a fitting motif, a structure that exists to mark where one space ends and another begins. The print prefigures the threshold-and-passage concerns that resurface in Tunnelscape (2022) and in the later site-responsive Japanese series.