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M+, Hong Kong, © Courtesy of Tadanori Yokoo
Yokoo Tadanori 橫尾忠則
The Aesthetics of End, Mishima Yukio 三島由紀夫，結局的美學
1966
This silkscreen poster was created for the essay ‘The Aesthetics of the End’ by Japanese writer Mishima Yukio. The print combines traditional Japanese and American pop imagery—an approach that is characteristic of Yokoo Tadanori’s designs—and also includes the motifs of death and sex that saturate Mishima’s work. A photograph of the writer appears at the upper left, and the image at the upper right refers to a scene in Mishima’s 1956 novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, in which a woman adds her own breast milk to a cup of tea. The wave evokes traditional ukiyo-e woodblock prints, and the rising sun symbol alludes to Japanese cultural history and to the legacy of the nation’s twentieth-century imperialism. The rising sun appeared on the flags of the Imperial Army and Navy and took on fraught connotations in the post-war years. Yokoo incorporated it as a provocative element across his body of work, and it takes on a special significance in this poster’s design; in his writing and his life, Mishima expressed an idiosyncratic nationalism with militaristic overtones.
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