Takako Yamaguchi is an artist and painter who has been based in Los Angeles since 1978. Moving between the United States, Japan and France in the early years of her practice, Yamaguchi developed a uniquely syncretic approach to art making well before the term “globalism” became commonplace. She has long been sensitive to the tension between an ostensibly race-neutral kind of International Modernism on the one hand, and the aesthetics of local, national and ethnic identity, on the other. Rebuffing the formal reductivism of European abstraction and the austerity of American Protestantism as simplifications of difference, Yamaguchi turned instead to what she once dubbed, “the trash-heap of discarded ideals.” There she focused her attention on such disfavored subjects as decoration, fashion and beauty, sentimentality, empathy and pleasure; a collection of forms and values she holds all the more dear for the ease with which they were displaced by modernity.
From the beginning, and intermittently over the course of her career, Yamaguchi has developed a repertoire of motifs sourced from her native Japan—images drawn from decorative screens, woodblock prints, kimono patterns, commercial graphic design—and deployed these in a manner she has dryly characterized as “self-orientalizing.” The artist’s “Japonisme,” so to speak, is further complicated by her engagement with other visual traditions intentionally outside of the current artistic zeitgeist, including European Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, Mexican Socialist murals, Art Nouveau, and Photorealism. Reveling in what has historically been deplored as fickle and superficial, and thus inevitably as feminine–as well as often racialized–the work manages to uncover commonalities between widely differing styles through Yamaguchi’s singular hand.
With an interest in recuperating the styles and histories abandoned by Modernism, Yamaguchi proposes a “poetics of resistance” where her own statement is ever-so-slightly out of step with prevailing taste and therefore only just barely legible at its moment of enunciation. Her Innocent Bystander series, for instance—executed in 1988 and 1989, just upon returning to Los Angeles after an extended stay abroad—inserted images of Eve borrowed from Lucas Cranach the Elder into a world of painterly flourishes derived from Western and Asian art history. Yamaguchi’s paintings in this series attempt to “recover” the ghost of a lost style, the kind of antiquated, nearly Victorian sensibility over which Modernism once so decisively triumphed. Subsequent paintings circle around the art of Diego Rivera from the 1920s and 1930s; a perhaps perverse choice for an artist of Asian ancestry but one which functions simultaneously as a love letter to an influential predecessor and as an indirect challenge to received notions of ethnic identity and the presumed ownership of culture. Yamaguchi followed these with a series of lavish portraits mining the fin-de-siecle decorative arts. Collectively titled, Smoking Woman, the paintings feature elaborate garments, feminine poses, pet cats, geometric patterns, cigarettes and cigarette smoke, combined together in an exquisitely subtle subversion of the expected politics of the culture wars that haunted the era.
At the turn of the millennium Yamaguchi revisited her aesthetic roots, producing a series of paintings that channel her own Japanese heritage into elaborate seascapes that also call to mind the heroic achievements of 19th-century European Romanticism. The paintings begin in an aleatoric spill of metallic paint which the artist then wrestles into submission by superimposing entangled ocean, cloud and landscape, themselves set into tension with geometric patterns alternating between crisp, bright colors and reflective bronze leaf, these multiple elements resolved finally in a “dialectic of order and chaos.” Somewhat related, but rather more restrained in affect, is the subsequent series of landscapes and seascapes she describes as “abstractions in reverse” as they attempt to reverse the history of art, moving backwards in time from pure abstraction toward naturalism, pausing to capture a moment of “semi-abstraction” somewhere along the way. And then, as if resisting the stabilization of her own aesthetic language, in the 2010s she embarked on an extended, unexpected exploration of realism. A series of hyper-generic female nudes somewhat loosely based on the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and others in his circle was followed by a group of closely cropped self-portraits featuring the artist’s own garments, which was then followed by a series of trompe l’oeil renderings of shallow white bas-relief constructions that slyly problematize the familiar distinctions between abstraction and representation.
Takako Yamaguchi (b. 1952, Okayama, Japan) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She received a BA from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine in 1975 and a MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1978. Takako Yamaguchi will present her first major survey exhibition, MOCA Focus: Takako Yamaguchi, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) from June 2025 to March 2026. She is the recipient of an Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2024). Her work is in the collections of Musée d’Art Moderne Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Nevada Museum, Reno; Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art; Long Beach Museum of Art, California; Eli Broad Family Foundation, Los Angeles; the Lynda and Stuart Resnick Collection, Los Angeles; and Deutsche Bank, New York, among others.
Portrait by Inez & Vinoodh, 2024
CURRICULUM VITAE
Born 1952 in Okayama, Japan
MFA, University of California, Santa Barbara, California, 1978
BA, Bates College, Lewiston, Maine, 1975
International Christian University, Tokyo, 1971–1973
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2024
Takako Yamaguchi: Eight Artworks, as-is.la, Los Angeles
2023
Takako Yamaguchi: New Paintings, Ortuzar Projects, New York
2021
Smoking Women, Egan and Rosen, New York
Takako Yamaguchi, STARS, Los Angeles
7+7, Ramiken Crucible, Brooklyn, New York
2019
Takako Yamaguchi: New Paintings, as-is.la, Los Angeles
2018
Takako Yamaguchi: New Paintings, as-is.la, Los Angeles
2010
Takako Yamaguchi, Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, Culver City, California
2009
Takako Yamaguchi, Jancar Jones Gallery, San Francisco
2008
Takako Yamaguchi: The Plain Sense of Things, Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, Culver City, California
2007
Takako Yamaguchi, Nevada Museum, Reno, Nevada
Takako Yamaguchi, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York
2006
Takako Yamaguchi, Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles
2003
Takako Yamaguchi, Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles
2001
Takako Yamaguchi, Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles
1999
Takako Yamaguchi, Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles
1997
Takako Yamaguchi, Hiro Chikashige Gallery, Okayama, Japan
1995
Takako Yamaguchi, Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles
1993
Takako Yamaguchi, Morishita Museum, Okayama, Japan
Takako Yamaguchi, Hiro Chikashige Gallery, Okayama, Japan
Takako Yamaguchi, Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles
1992
Takako Yamaguchi, Galeria OMR, Mexico City
1991
Takako Yamaguchi, Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles
1989
Takako Yamaguchi, Raab Gallery, Berlin
1988
Takako Yamaguchi, Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles
1985
Takako Yamaguchi, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York
Takako Yamaguchi, Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles
1984
Takako Yamaguchi, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York
1983
Takako Yamaguchi, Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles
Takako Yamaguchi, Grapestake Gallery, San Francisco
1982
Takako Yamaguchi, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York
1981
Takako Yamaguchi, Baum-Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles
Takako Yamaguchi, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York
Takako Yamaguchi, Grapestake Gallery, San Francisco
1980
Takako Yamaguchi, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York
Takako Yamaguchi, Grapestake Gallery, San Francisco
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2024
Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than The Real Thing, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Color Field Queens: Female Artists of the 1970s, Lincoln Glenn, New York
Infinite Regress: Mystical Abstraction from the Permanent Collection and Beyond, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri
Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
2021
The Ocean, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway
The Beatitudes of Malibu, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
Delusianarium 5, Night Gallery, Los Angeles
389, Ramiken Crucible, New York
2020
Comedy of Erros, The Gallery at El Centro, Los Angeles
2019
With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Exhibition traveled to Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York
2018
Collecting on the Edge, Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, Utah
2017
Tow Truck Towing a Tow Truck, as-is.la, Los Angeles
COLA 20th Anniversary Exhibition, LAMAG, Los Angeles
2015
Transcendence: Abstraction & Symbolism in the American West, Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, Utah
2014
Landscape, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California
2008
Emphasis Santa Monica, Peter & Susan Barrett Art Gallery, Santa Monica College, Santa Monica, California
2007
Multiple Vantage Points: Southern California Women Artists 1980–2006, Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles
Echoes: Women Inspired by Nature, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Anna, California
30th Anniversary Show, Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles
2005
Contemporary Soliloquies on the Natural World, University of Southern California Fisher Gallery, Los Angeles
IROHA: Japanese-Angelino Artists, Manhattan Beach Creative Arts Center, Manhattan Beach, California
2004
C.O.L.A. Individual Artist Fellowship Exhibition, Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles
2003
LAPD—Los Angeles Pattern and Decoration, Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Los Angeles
2002
L.A. Post-Cool, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, California. Exhibition traveled to Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles.
2000
Gallery Artists, Hiro Chikashige Gallery, Okayama, Japan
1999
Selections, Glendale College Gallery, Glendale, California
California Dreamin: Contemporary Art from the Bank of America, Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina
1998
My Favorite Femmes, Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles
1997
20th Anniversary Show, Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles
1996
Love’s Labors Lost, SITE, Los Angeles
1995
Diversification of Passages, Mt. San Antonio College, Walnut, California
1994
The Sacred and the Profane, Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles
New Old Masters, Center for the Arts at the Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco
NEO, Galeria OMR, Colonia Roma, Mexico City
The Asian Spirit in Contemporary California Art, Weingart Center for the Liberal Arts, Occidental College, Los Angeles
1988
Gallery Artists, Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles
1987
Gallery Artists, Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles
Exceptional Excess: Transcending the Ordinary, Santa Monica Community College, Santa Monica, California
1987
Borrowed Embellishments, Charlotte Crosby Kemper Gallery, The Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, Missouri
1986
Landscape/Elements, Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles
1982
Los Angeles Pattern Painters, ARCO Center for Visual Art, Los Angeles
Architectural Attitudes, Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles
Decorative Motifs and Pattern Paintings, Security Pacific Bank, Los Angeles
1981
Between the Freeways: The Art of Downtown Los Angeles, Madison Art Center, Madison, Wisconsin
1980
Downtown L.A. in Santa Barbara, College of Creative Studies Gallery, University of California, Santa Barbara, California
Young Painters of the ‘80’s, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York
1979
California in Chicago, West Hubbard Gallery, Chicago
Cross-pollination, The Women's Building, Los Angeles
City College Gallery, Santa Barbara City College, Santa Barbara, California
1978
Space Gallery, Los Angeles
Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York