
Interview with Tadanori Yokoo from Japanese Times:
But you ended up choosing the path of graphic design, which is close to art. How did that happen?
Well, I needed to make a living. I was actually adopted by the Yokoo
family and my adoptive mother and father were already quite old. I
needed to generate income, so I started working straight after high
school — first at a printing company, then at the Kobe Shimbun newspaper
and then at an advertising agency.
Were you doing design work at those companies?
That’s right. I just learned on the job.
Eventually you decided to go to Tokyo. Why did you make that move?
Well, the reaction I got to my design work was good, so I kept it up.
I came to Tokyo with the advertising agency in 1960, and shortly
afterward I moved to a dedicated design company.
In what way was the reaction to your work good?
Well I entered my designs in exhibitions and they won prizes. And
then I gradually realized that this might be a good job to do. And then I
came to Tokyo and at the time what lay behind everything that was being
done was this idea of “modern design.”
Do you mean the very simple, function-over-form style of design, where all decorative elements were excised?
Yes. I had a very strong yearning for this modern design, but at the
same time I had been raised in a kind of premodern age — a nativist kind
of climate, where the old ways remained in place. So for me, in order
to enter this world of modern design, there were many things inside me
that I had to discard.
But at the same time, I had this lingering doubt about whether I
really should be doing something simply as a job or if I should try to
do it as a work of art. You know, it’s all very well to be in sync with
the trends of the day, but is there something of yourself being
expressed in the design? Is it really your own design or not?
So then I went through this process of thinking that I should try to
incorporate those premodern or nativist elements into modern design. And
it was from that point that what is really my own design was born.
What kind of old-style, decorative elements were you bringing into your work?
My adoptive father had been a kimono-fabric wholesaler when he was
still working. So in our house there were lots of the labels that they
would put on the fabrics when they sold them, and those labels had
wonderful designs — designs that blended Western and Japanese motifs.
They were sort of slightly tacky, mysterious. I guess now you would call
them “kitsch.”
There were also cards for menko (a children’s game in which
wooden cards are slapped down in order to overturn an opponent’s cards),
and those cards had pictures of samurai and film stars and sports
stars.
Those kinds of things formed the visual language with which I was
surrounded. I tried to bring all of that baggage into the framework of
Modernism.
How was your work viewed in the design community? The company you
joined, Nippon Design Center, was run by a leading figure in Japanese
Modernist design, Ikko Tanaka (1930-2002), and you had deliberately
sought out that company. How did Tanaka and the others there react to
your work?
What I was doing constituted quite a critique of design as it existed
at the time. I was going back and picking up all these things that
Modernist design had discarded. People in the design community tended to
see my work as “anti-design.”
The people in my company? Well, they had all grown up in the same
kind of environment as me. I think for them, it was probably sort of
like being reminded of a terrible nightmare! But it wasn’t that we
totally disagreed.
For me, incorporating those things into my work was actually a way to
get them out of my system. By confronting that old stuff, by putting it
out there, I was trying to discard it, too.
I was told by Yukio Mishima once that there were three things that he
and I had in common, and one of those was that we sought to deny
nativism. But he said, “I denied nativism by expunging it. You deny it
by depicting it head-on.”
What were the other two things you had in common?
He also said that the thing Japanese are worst at is black humor, but
that my work had black humor. The third thing was that we both had very
thin wrists. And he grabbed my wrist as we were sitting in a taxi. That
was his black humor at work there!
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