SUBWAY ADVERTISING AS ART

By GUY DIXON

Take the organic, vaguely art nouveau swirl of 1960s psychedelic poster art. Transpose it into an explosive Japanese aesthetic, with kabuki scenes, smiling Buddhas and various tacky Japanicana. And, bang, you have something resembling the fascinatingly cluttered work of celebrated artist Tadanori Yokoo.

A large retrospective of his poster work from 1993 to 2005 on display at the Japan Foundation on Bloor Street is a bombardment on the eyes. In poster after poster, antiquated and contemporary Japanese imagery whirl around in a blaze of colour, all advertising various theatre productions, films and other events. Yokoo has even lent his unique touch to posters advertising local Japanese municipalities (oh, to have had him add more zest to the Toronto Unlimited campaign).

But there's a method to Yokoo's madness. Look closely. The collage of images make the eye constantly swirl around the poster. One traditional Japanese noh theatre image leading to a Buddhist icon leading off into other tangents, such as fairy-tale kitsch. Around and around the eye moves. It's impossible to stay centred on only one image. The effect invariably turns each poster into a mini story.

Born in 1936, Yokoo rose to prominence with his seemingly self-reflective 1965 Tadanori Yokoo poster, an incredible work centred around the image of a small cartoon figure hanging by a noose high above the blazing rays of Japan's militaristic Rising Sun symbol setting in the background. In the four corners of the posters are irreverent images, including a volcanic Mount Fuji and the artist's baby and school photos. The overall effect is like the cartoon psychedelia soon to come out of London and San Francisco.

That work helped to push Yokoo toward creating posters for experimental Japanese theatre companies and illustrating the writings of Mishima Yukio and others, while also producing posters for yakuza crime films. By 1968, he was receiving international acclaim and was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The Japan Foundation has continued its current series of poster exhibitions since 1998. However, most of the poster and graphic-design work it shows tends to be modern and geometrical, clean and cool. Not Yokoo's work, said Toshi Aoyagi, program officer at the foundation. "He is the god of anti-modernistic expression," he said, adding that the posters could be seen as a reaction against Japanese modernism's denial of older Japanese art's cluttered tendencies.

And like psychedelic poster art, there is something strangely, yet intentionally, old-fashioned in Yokoo's work.

Tadanori Yokoo: Recent Poster Works 1993-2005 continues until Dec. 15 at the Japan Foundation, 131 Bloor St. W., second level.