Takako Yamaguchi and Anna Katz in Conversation

The Pattern and Decoration–era work of Los Angeles–based artist Takako Yamaguchi stages the dynamics of cultural and aesthetic appropriation. As an art student in the United States, Yamaguchi, who was born and raised in Japan, was confronted with her peers’ and teachers’ insistence that Japanese art was minimal. Her response to this misunderstanding of the outsize role of the decorative in Japanese art was to summon in her own art the excess and opulence of traditional Japanese painting, such as the gold-leaf grounds of folding screens and the designs of kimono robes. In this way, her work maps a complex terrain: responding to the American avant-garde’s consumption of Japan as a “Disneyland of minimalism,” Yamaguchi highlighted the maximal, decorative aspects of Japanese art. So, too, she poked holes in what she perceived as the monomaniacal fixation of American art discourse on undermining beauty. Yamaguchi joins MOCA Curator Anna Katz in a conversation about her work in the exhibition.

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