05/08/2025
On view | Teruko Yokoi: Noh Theater, through June 14.
Born in Japan in 1924, Yokoi trained in traditional Japanese painting at the encouragement of her father, a calligrapher and poet who taught her both art forms. In 1953, in the wake of World War II, she left Japan for San Francisco. As one of two Japanese students at the California School of Fine Arts, Yokoi turned to abstraction and received many scholarships and grants, one which allowed her to move to New York in 1955 to study with Hans Hofmann. Becoming one of the few women artists in the 1950s New York milieu of Abstract Expressionism, Yokoi developed deep friendships with Joan Mitchell, Kenzo Okada, and Mark Rothko, among others. In 1957, Yokoi met and later married Sam Francis, with whom she lived in the Hotel Chelsea for a few years before separating and moving to Paris. Yokoi ultimately settled in Switzerland, recognizing in its pristine landscapes the characteristics of the Japanese landscape of her childhood.
Throughout her many travels and relocations, Yokoi remained deeply rooted in Japanese cultural traditions while embracing certain modern sensibilities. She drew heavily from Japanese influences such as calligraphy, traditional music, the tea ceremony, and Noh Theater, amassing a collection of hundreds of Noh Theater books. The exhibition at Hollis Taggart suggests Noh Theater as a conceptual lens through which to view the many layers of Yokoi’s work. Much like Noh actors change masks to reveal new dimensions, Yokoi shifted identities across her various international moves. Noh Theater offered the artist a framework for maintaining the delicate balance between tradition and modernity that resulted in her masterful integration of East Asian visual aesthetics with experimental lyrical abstraction. Beyond this, Noh Theater is actually physically present in some of the artist’s works, as Yokoi sometimes incorporated antique mulberry washi paper, traditionally used to print libretti for Noh performances. This symbolic layering of fragments of Japanese visual culture within her compositions demonstrates how foundational Yokoi’s heritage was to her work, even as she travelled the world and participated in dialogues that shaped the future of modern art.
