The five covers of T’s annual Culture issue — which this year is devoted entirely to Japan and its outsize cultural influence on the world — feature six of the country’s icons, one of whom is nonhuman. The 88-year-old artist and graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo made a collage featuring classic Japanese monsters — with Godzilla as the star — for his cover. The other subjects were shot by the photographer Piczo in various Tokyo locations at night, accompanied by models wearing spring looks from Japanese fashion designers and replicas of ancient Japanese masks, many of them from the tradition of Noh theater, which dates to the 14th century. The diverse group, which includes an international television star, a shape-shifting photographer, a pair of architects reconceiving contemporary museum design and a wildly successful artist, has redefined the way that Japan looks, thinks and creates.
Takashi Murakami
With work that includes painting and sculpture but also music videos, album covers, toys, key chains, trading cards and a recently rereleased collection of Louis Vuitton bags, Takashi Murakami, 63, is arguably Japan’s best-known living artist. The founder of the Superflat movement — which compresses the iconography of Japanese culture into cartoonish, brightly colored 2-D imagery — Murakami, who is based in Tokyo, studied traditional Japanese painting in art school, an education reflected in two new exhibits. A solo show at Gagosian in New York opening in May will include the paintings he created in response to the 19th-century artist Utagawa Hiroshige’s “100 Famous Views of Edo,” while “Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow,” on view from May 25 to Sept. 7 at the Cleveland Museum of Art, will fill the museum’s atrium with his re-creation of the Yumedono (or Hall of Dreams), an octagonal structure built in the eighth century as part of the Horyuji temple complex in Nara.
Hair and makeup by Rie Shiraishi. Model: Mayo at Stanford
Marie Kondo
Marie Kondo, 40, realized at age 5 that she preferred organizing her dolls to playing with them. As a 19-year-old university student in Tokyo, she established what she calls her “tidying” business and, seven years later, in 2010, published her first book, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” which has been translated into 44 languages and adapted into a hit Netflix series. It was Kondo’s show that introduced mainstream America to the idea that possessions worth holding on to should, as she has famously said, “spark joy,” a concept she discovered after blacking out during a particularly grueling clutter-clearing session and waking up to find that, if she looked at them closely, treasured objects appeared to glow. Her company is now based in Los Angeles.
Hair by Yusuke Morioka at Eight Peace. Makeup by Asami Taguchi at Home Agency Tokyo. Prop stylist: Agnes Natawijaya. Model: Mayo at Stanford
Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa
In 1987, Kazuyo Sejima, 68 (center), founded her namesake architecture firm after working for the esteemed conceptual architect Toyo Ito. Three years later, she hired Ryue Nishizawa, 59, fresh out of architecture school and, in 1995, they established their Tokyo-based partnership, SANAA (Sejima and Nishizawa and Associates). Since then, they have designed projects ranging from homes, fashion boutiques and furniture to museums, including the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, New York’s New Museum and Louvre-Lens in northern France. Today they’re known for their fluid, minimalist, often white structures that play with the reflective properties of glass. In 2010, the pair won the Pritzker Prize, making Sejima only the second woman to be awarded architecture’s highest honor and Nishizawa its youngest-ever recipient.
Hair by Yusuke Morioka at Eight Peace. Makeup by Asami Taguchi at Home Agency Tokyo. Prop stylist: Agnes Natawijaya. Model: Mayo at Stanford
Yasumasa Morimura
In his photographs and films, the artist Yasumasa Morimura, 73, has cast himself as Frida Kahlo, Vincent van Gogh and Diego Velázquez, using props, makeup, costumes and digital manipulation to reinvent masterpieces and challenge traditional ideas about mortality, colonization and Asian identity. “East meets West in my work, but I haven’t made an attempt to merge the two worlds,” Morimura, who lives in his native Osaka, has said. “They exist in opposition.” Currently his work is paired with that of another master of disguise, the American photographer Cindy Sherman, in the two-person exhibition “Yasumasa Morimura and Cindy Sherman: Masquerades,” at the M+ museum in Hong Kong (through May 5).
Hair and makeup by Rie Shiraishi. Prop stylist: Agnes Natawijaya. Model: Mayo at Stanford
Tadanori Yokoo
By the 1960s, Tadanori Yokoo was already Japan’s most famous graphic designer, known for his psychedelic posters for the Beatles and Cat Stevens and his trippy album covers for Santana and other musicians. It wasn’t until the 1980s, after being inspired during a visit to a Pablo Picasso show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, that he decided to establish a fine-art practice. Four decades later, the prolific Yokoo, now 88, still works out of his Tokyo studio on paintings, prints and collages that mix abstract and figurative styles, as well as Asian and Western imagery. A solo exhibition of new works in oil at Tokyo’s Setagaya Art Museum will run through June 22, and a monograph of his work is set to be published by Thames & Hudson next year.
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