Pot in Waterfall

Tadanori Yokoo is a Japanese contemporary artist born in Hyogo Prefecture in 1936. Being a successful graphic designer in the 1960s, Yokoo established his unique style in the late 1960s by designing stage posters for playwrights, including Tatsumi Hijikata, Juro Kara, and Shuji Terayama. He also developed personal relationships with photographer Eikoh Hosoe, author Yukio Mishima, and film director Nagisa Oshima through collaborations. Yokoo’s distinctive style, the fusion of Japanese Pop art and avant-garde art, won popularity and gained international recognition, which led to his solo show at Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1972. After seeing a Picasso show in 1980, Yokoo declared that he would define himself as a painter in 1981. Since the declaration, his activities as a “fine artist” continue to this day with the focus of creation on paintings.

While all things in universe are motifs for Yokoo, he has specifically created a number of waterfall paintings. On the canvas of Pot in Waterfall, Yokoo attached pieces of mirror along the rectangular frame of the canvas. The face of a man is also rectangularly framed by pieces of mirror. Yokoo drew this man posing in the same way as Yukio Mishima did as a subject of Eiko Hosoe’s photo book. Mishima drawn in the rectangular mirror may be Yokoo himself facing the canvas, in other words Yokoo in the mirror.