Published on the ccasion of the exhibition Teruko Yokoi - held March 7 - April 20, 2024 at Marlborough Gallery New York - Curator and Marlborough CEO Douglas Walla published Ms Yokoi's 8th book preceedign her retrospective solo exhibition in New York. The publication includes an Essay by Anke Kempkes titled Voyager: Teruko Yokoi's Landscape of Abstratction, pulling photograph's from the Estate's archives and taking the reader through a hisotrical journey of Teruko's career, cultural identity and and how she fit into, or maintained her position on the periphery of specific millieus as she moved between Tokyo, San Francisco, New York, Paris and Bern.
Much like the Exhibition, the book and accompanying essay presented a visual chronology of the interpersonal influences and socio-cultural circumstances that informed her practice and showed up as in both acceptance or rejection of specific artisitic periods. The Essay chronicles Yokoi's travel to San Franciscos in the early 1950s as placing her just outside of the grasps of the emergence of Japan's Gutai movement just as she began to fully embrace abstract expressionism as a formal departure from her figurative past. As fate would have it, GUtai spread to New York and Paris at a time when dialogues were started with Helen Frankenthaller, Jackson Pollock and Sam Francis. Soon thereafter, she would move to New York, attending the Hans Hoffman school on Scholarship and meet and marry Sam in a brief entanglement, placing her in intersecting circles in New York and Paris.
The book investigates relationships Yokoi had with Joan Mitchell, Kenzo Okada, Mark Rothko, Sam Francis and others, comparing, contrasting and highlighting influences between their work. The essay goes even deeper in exploring the origins in some of the prominent forms and motifs that appear in Yokoi's works. In the case of the diamond motif, quoting Yokoi and pointing back to her personal and familial narratives of tradtional and Samurai ancestry as they appear in her avant garde and contemporary representations of these symbolic motif's. Both the book and the exhibition help uncover an oft overlooked or undiscovered artist and summarize her career through this retrospective as "First a longing during her nomadic artistic journey in the midst of cultural renewal and political restauration in both East and West, in her maturing years she wwas able to give this stylistic uniuon a sense of equilibrium transcending time, history and space, the former"whirlwind" of contemporaneity and the experience fo cultural displacement."