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M+, Hong Kong, © Courtesy of Tadanori Yokoo
On View
The Cabinet
Yokoo Tadanori 橫尾忠則
Beams
1997
Yokoo Tadanori designed this poster for the lifestyle and clothing department store BEAMS, established in Tokyo’s Harajuku district in 1976. The hand-painted photographs of founder Shitara Etsuzo and current CEO Shitara Yo occupy the upper-right and lower-left corners respectively, exemplifying Yokoo’s practice of incorporating the faces of a company’s management team into his designs for promotional material. ‘BEAMS’ appears above the firm’s logo: an image of Earth encircled by a planetary ring. Iconography from Western art history—an angel, Cupid, and sailors on a stormy sea—seems to be drawn towards the logo, as if powerless to resist the gravitational pull of the brand. Beams of light in yellow, blue, purple, and pink radiate from the clouds, the Earth, and the image of Shitara Yo, clearly referencing the brand’s name but also evoking the Japanese rising sun symbol. The rising sun is a provocative motif across Yokoo’s work; it has a long history in Japanese culture and was used on the flags of the Imperial Army and Navy during the period of Japanese colonial and military expansion from the 1870s until 1945. Yokoo places the symbol in a graphic landscape that implies an associative commentary on national identity, history, and contemporary culture.
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