That Suburb

The demonstrative "that" gives the title a particular grammatical weight: a place known to the artist but unnamed for the viewer, marked as remembered rather than identified. Given Yokoo's extended period of study in Melbourne, the suburb in question may belong to either Australia or Japan, and the ambiguity is part of the image's working logic. Aluminium-plate lithography permits the kind of even, flat tonal field appropriate to a place held in memory — neither sharp documentary record nor dreamlike abstraction. Suburbs in printmaking carry their own iconographic baggage, distinct from the meisho-e tradition of celebrated places: they are the inhabited but undistinguished, the periphery rather than the destination. Yokoo's print works against the impulse to monumentalise, framing the suburb as a site of bodily memory rather than civic interest. The work belongs to his ongoing examination of place as something the body carries with it after leaving — a residue rather than a view.