Strigoica - Spring Night, 2021
Social media has its many benefits and pitfalls. My favorite benefit is most definitely the ease with which one can be exposed to the work of an artist that they might have otherwise never known about. A prime example of this for me is Takato Yamamoto, master of "Heisei Aestheticism". He coined that term himself to describe his fusion of traditional Japanese ukiyo-e and European gothic horror. Born in 1960 in Japan's Akita prefecture, he attended Tokyo Zokei University. After graduating in 1983 with a painting degree, he started his career in commercial work. It wasn't until the 1990s that he really began to dive into his personal work.
I originally began seeing Yamamoto's art making the rounds on Facebook and Twitter in 2014 or 2015. I certainly enjoyed it at the time, but never bothered to actively seek out and investigate the person behind the art. It wasn't until 2021 that I even learned his name! I had gone on a day trip with a few friends to a Japanese marketplace in New Jersey (Mitsuwa Marketplace, in case anyone was curious). We were browsing a bookstore and I, not knowing a lick of Japanese, was picking books based on their cover art. One book was placed on the shelf with its cover facing forward and featured a pale girl with an exposed ribcage. She looked intriguing and familiar, so I grabbed the book, opened it, and noticed some of the paintings I had seen shared online over the years. I shut the book, saw the name "Takato Yamamoto" on the cover, and the rest (my obsession) is history. I left the bookstore a few hundred bucks lighter that day.
Nosferatu - Joy, 2018
There is a huge contrast between Yamamoto's style and his subject matter. His lines are so delicate and frail, as if they were threads that could be blown away with the slightest breeze. They're intoxicatingly frail- I feel like I love the sickliness of his linework the way that Victorian societies were infatuated with the pale complexion that tuberculosis gave its victims. His colors are meek- there is usually a maximum of one vibrant hue (if any) in a given piece, usually red. And even then, much of that color's saturation is due to the sheer lack of saturation in the rest of the painting. Light and shadow exists on a smooth, gentle spectrum. There are very few rough, solid highlights or shadows to be found- most everything floats in seas of analogous colors.
Blood and Rose, 2018
Much of the content of his paintings, however, is quite the opposite. Yes, he sometimes dabbles in love, but he is also incredibly fond of bondage, blood, bones, viscera, and morbid acceptance. I think that acceptance is his most unifying theme- the characters in his paintings, no matter how unpleasant their circumstances - are never shown fighting, struggling, or attempting to exercise any degree of control over their situation. His works are the embodiment of the phrase "Memento mori" ("Remember you must die") albeit with a somewhat different spin depending on each piece, like: "Remember you will get your ribs ripped out of you and one of your kidneys shoved into your chest" (see Androgynous) or "Remember you will be completely dissected from the neck down" (see Pulse).
But I should correct myself. A lot of the acceptance in his works seems morbid. However, other instances could definitely be indulgent- see Strigoica- Spring Night, Nosferatu - Joy, and Blood and Rose. Vampires- a classic villain trope. Homosexuality- unfortunately also a villain trope. While the more heroic variety of LGBTQ representation has become more common over the years, for many years LGBTQ representation was commonly reserved for villains. It's difficult to say whether the subjects in Yamamoto's pieces are heroes or villains- I'd argue that most of them lack enough context to say. I mean, even look at the skeleton general in Warring Land Holocaust. Which side was it on? Was it perpetrating or fighting against the holocaust? The other skeletons in the background- are they innocents that it killed? Or that it died fighting for?
Pulse, 2009
But I think that's part of the point of Yamamoto's work. Did the black-haired girl in Strigoica- Spring Night consent to being bitten? Or is it more of the traditional non-consensual vampire shenanigans? Nobody can say for sure. Same goes for the black-haired boy in Nosferatu - Joy. And Yamamoto seems fine with that. He doesn't seem concerned with people's moral compasses. He's mostly concerned with anguish and death, and how inevitable they are. How someone ends up at those points or whether or not they deserved them is of little importance.
Androgynous, 2008
Now, whether or not Yamamoto truly means any of what I am guessing at is beyond me. He is rather reserved. He doesn't do many interviews, and when he posts his work he provides little commentary with it. But that's the beauty of creative work, in my opinion. The death of the author, the death of the artist, the death of the composer- what the creator of a work wants to say doesn't matter in the end. The reader/viewer/listener ultimately comes to their own conclusion and interpretation. I mean, don't get me wrong, if an artist explicitly tells me what they were conveying in their work, then I will strongly account for that in my interpretation. But when you have one creator of a work vs hundreds, or thousands, or millions, of people who experience that work, then the myriad of perspectives, personalities, and attitudes that "chew and swallow" also have every right to say how something "tastes".
Warring Land Holocaust, 2009
So when you mix Yamamoto's dainty, fluttery line works and color pallets with his often brutal and jarring subjects, the final result is absolutely surreal. You're faced with delicate deaths, gentle gore, elegant eviscerations, and tender tortures. He walks - no - dances on a frayed tightrope, never missing a single step.
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You can find Takato Yamamoto's website here: yamamototakato.com
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