Takako Yamaguchi

At the start of my career, now more than forty years ago, I made a conscious commitment to the idea of “difference.” This allowed me to sidestep such then mainstream positions in contemporary art as “the tough,” “the ugly,” “the angry” and seek inspiration instead in what a poet once dubbed, “the trash heap” of abandoned ideals. There I discovered decoration, fashion and beauty along with sentimentality, empathy and pleasure; forms and values I hold all the more precious for their long exclusion from serious consideration. Ever since then I’ve aspired to make paintings that express this kind of “poetics of minority opinion,” where the lost and abandoned object can be recovered and recognized for what it is—a genuinely different thing that is therefore interesting and provocative in ways that, for all its authority, the dominant discourse can never be.

Takako Yamaguchi is a Japanese-born artist and painter who has lived and worked in the United States for most of her professional career. Her paintings often depict familiar motifs, such as seascapes and landscapes, which are then “complicated” with patterns and elements drawn from the fabric designs of kimonos and other iconography from Japanese culture. Yamaguchi was introduced to the work of the American Pattern and Decoration painters in the 1970’s and she continues to extend and enrich the ideas of that movement which first inspired her as a young artist.

Takako Yamaguchi: New Paintings (2023) at Ortuzar Projects, New York, NY, featured ten seascape paintings complicated by decorative and abstract elements. Created with oil paint and bronze leaf on canvas, the paintings develop themes that have engaged the artist for decades, including the tensions thought to exist between abstraction and representation, invention and repetition, and “East” and “West.” Each work explores the traditions and conventions of European and Japanese art, first pulling their characteristic elements apart and then combining them in new and unexpected ways. 

Yamaguchi’s other exhibitions include Takako Yamaguchi (2022), as-is.la, Los Angeles, CA (2022); 7x7 (2021), Ramiken Crucible, New York, NY; Takako Yamaguchi (2021), Egan and Rosen, New York, NY; Takako Yamaguchi (2021), STARS Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985 (2019-2021), at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA and the Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College at Annadale-on-Hudson, NY; Nude, Akt, Nu: New Paintings by Takako Yamaguchi (2010), Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, Culver City, CA; and So-Called Laws of Nature: Paintings by Takako Yamaguchi (2007), Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada. 

She has been awarded a Tree of Life Individual Artist Grant (2018), a California Community Foundation Fellowship (2008), the Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant (2006), and the City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Master Artist Project (IMAP) Grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (2004). 

Yamaguchi received her M.F.A. from the University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA in 1978 and her B.A. from Bates College, Lewiston, ME in 1975. She attended the International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan from 1971-1973.