Roadworks (Yanaka) — print 1

Print 1 of Roadworks (Yanaka), pulled in 2025, is one of the few works in Yokoo's catalogue made on stone rather than aluminium plate, signalling the more deliberate, slower investment that traditional stone lithography demands. Yanaka is a shitamachi neighbourhood in northeast Tokyo that survived the firebombings of 1945 and has retained its low rooflines, narrow lanes, and dense temple presence; it is one of the few areas of central Tokyo where pre-war urban fabric remains legible. The Roadworks title points to the ongoing, small-scale construction and repair that quietly reshapes such districts — pavement excavations, utility trenches, temporary barriers — incidents most residents pass without registering. Stone lithography, with its long preparatory etch and burnishing process, suits a subject whose meaning is sedimented and slow. Print 1 sets the visual key for the series, continuing the site-anchored method Yokoo developed in Our Implications (Minami Shimabara) the previous year, where each edition is bound to a specific Japanese place and to that place's accumulated history.