Takako Yamaguchi

Takako Yamaguchi pioneered a distinctive syncretic approach to art creation long before the term "globalism" gained common use.

Biography of Takako Yamaguchi

Takako Yamaguchi was born in 1952 in Okayama, Japan. In the early years of her career, Yamaguchi traveled between Japan, the U.S., and France.

She pursued her studies at the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan, from 1971 to 1973. She obtained her BA from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, in 1975, and later completed her MFA at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1978.

Since 1978, the artist lives and works in Los Angeles.

Yamaguchi has showcased her art through numerous solo exhibitions at various venues, including Ramiken Crucible in New York, Egan and Rosen in New York, STARS Gallery in Los Angeles, Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Nevada Museum in Reno, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, and Jan Baum Gallery in Los Angeles.

Yamaguchi's artwork can be found in the collections of institutions including the Nevada Museum in Reno, the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, the Long Beach Museum of Art in California, the Eli Broad Family Foundation in Los Angeles, the Lynda and Stuart Resnick Collection in Los Angeles, as well as Deutsche Bank in New York, and more.

Takako Yamaguchi's Art Style 

Yamaguchi had a strong affiliation with the Pattern and Decoration movement in the United States during the 1970s. Her art embraces elements that have historically been overlooked by the formal reductivism of Euro-American abstraction and modernism. Decoration, fashion, beauty, sentimentality, empathy, and pleasure—qualities and styles marginalized by modernism and contemporary artistic trends—are integral components of Yamaguchi's painting practice.

From the outset and at various points throughout her career, Yamaguchi has cultivated a collection of motifs inspired by her Japanese heritage. These motifs are derived from decorative screens, woodblock prints, kimono patterns, and commercial graphic design. She has described her approach to using these motifs as "self-orientalizing."

As the millennium turned, Yamaguchi returned to her aesthetic origins, creating a series of paintings inspired by her Japanese heritage. These artworks portray intricate seascapes that evoke the heroic achievements of 19th-century European Romanticism. The creative process for these paintings starts with a random spill of metallic paint, which the artist subsequently shapes by superimposing interwoven depictions of the ocean, clouds, and landscapes. These elements are juxtaposed with geometric patterns that alternate between vivid, crisp colors and reflective bronze leaves. The final result is a "dialectic of order and chaos."

In the 2010s, she delved into an extensive and unanticipated exploration of realism. Her journey began with a series of hyper-generic female nudes, loosely inspired by photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and his contemporaries. This was followed by a collection of self-portraits that highlighted the artist's own clothing. Subsequently, she created a series of trompe l'oeil renditions of shallow, white bas-relief structures, playfully challenging the conventional boundaries that separate abstraction from representation.