Title: Tadanori Yokoo
Editor: Mark Holborn
Designer: Jesse Holborn
Essays by Mark Holborn, Yukio Mishima

Limited to 500 copies, Unit Editions presents an exclusive edition of the first major English-language monograph of legendary Japanese designer and artist Tadanori Yokoo, connecting his inimitable approach to graphic design with his extensive body of work as a painter and revealing his determination to ignore the boundaries between the two.

Book

Featuring 450 illustrations, the book covers Yokoo’s work across multiple media: from posters, calendar and record sleeve designs to his collage work and paintings in oils and acrylics. Ordering his work chronologically by decade – from the 1960s to the present day – each chapter opens with an outline of Yokoo’s personal journey alongside the wider historical events of the period. 

Opening with an introductory essay on Yokoo and post-war Japan by editor Mark Holborn, the book also includes an in-depth study of one of the designer’s most significant projects (written by Holborn) and reproduces the essay ‘Popcorn Spiritualism’, novelist Yukio Mishima’s 1968 text on Yokoo’s work. 

“His work is full of contradictions and that is what makes it so exciting and original. There is a refusal to settle into a single voice or aesthetic, and yet the work is always entirely from his own unique world.”
–Jonathan Barnbrook

Tadanori Yokoo

Born in Nishiwaki-cho, Hyogo prefecture in 1936, Yokoo was living in Tokyo by the 1960s and recognised as the most talented graphic artist of the period, collaborating with many significant creative figures of the time. These included film and theatre directors, photographers and novelists such as Yukio Mishima, whose book, Barakei, made with photographer Eikoh Hosoe, was designed by Yokoo in 1970 and is the subject of Holborn’s second essay in the book.

Yokoo has been seen as representative of a generation that came to prominence in conjunction with the post-war economic ‘miracle’ – he designed the Japanese textile pavilion for the Osaka Expo of 1970, an event that heralded the nation’s recovery. He was also part of the team that designed pictograms for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Three years later, MoMA New York acquired fifteen of his posters.

Yokoo’s graphic work was both innovative and independent from the corresponding psychedelic elements of the music scene of the 1960s, yet traditional with foundations in Japanese symbolism and the ukiyo-e woodblock tradition. Forgoing a minimalist approach, his highly saturated illustrations could be violent and erotic, controversial statements within the graphic tradition of an otherwise restrained and conventional culture. Yokoo often blended a sense of the absurd with traditional symbols and motifs, mixing high and low culture in his work.

In 1980, Yokoo visited the Picasso retrospective exhibition at MoMA, which changed his life: from this point, he decided to become a painter. The challenge he faced was that he was so accomplished as a designer, Western critics were initially sceptical of his work as a painter. Despite this, he began to develop his own, emphatically Yokoo-style of painting and with time his unique visual language emerged to reflect both his personal identity and his generation’s extraordinary history. 

As an artist, graphic designer and illustrator, Yokoo’s work has been celebrated both within Japan and internationally. He celebrates his 90th birthday in June 2026.

Specifications

Standard edition
Size: 340 x 275 mm
Pages: 528
Paper/printing: 4/4 on 135gsm Condat matt Périgord FSC
End papers: 4/4 on 140gsm Vol.1.20 Magno Natural FSC + varnish
Binding: Hardback, thread-sewn, separated ends, square spine
Case: 4/0 on 130gsm Vol.0.82 GardaMatt Art FSC over 3.0mm board + matt lamination
Typefaces: Neutraface No. 2 (House Industries) and Janson

Slipcase details: 130gsm GardaMatt FSC printed 4/0 + 1/s anti-scuff matt lamination over 3.0mm FSC greyboards. Lining paper: pre-dyed Sirio Color 115gsm.

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£125