Teruko Yokoi – Selected Readings

Summer 2026
Teruko Yokoi, Artist's Personal Journal, April 16, 2026
Teruko Yokoi. HInageshi Project 
KENT FINE ART in conjunction with Upstate Art Weekend Is pleased to present TERUKO YOKOI Hinageshi Poppies On View June 25 – 29, 2026, 10 – 6 pm July by appointment Yokoi enjoyed a pastoral childhood, wandering the hills outside Nagoya with her father, a calligrapher and poet who instructed her in both art forms. The pair frequently ventured out on what he called haiku hiroi (haiku-gathering) expeditions, soaking up impressions of the natural world to transliterate into poetry. She later described her paintings as "poems written in colors.” There, one morning while walking to her studio, she had a mystical experience. She felt an uncanny sensation of cold wind blowing through her entire body, as if she were porous and transparent. Somehow, this reawakened her idyll of Old Japan, which she called "my paradise- everything was crystal clear from the mountains down to the Pacific... even the fish were transparent." It was a turning point in her work. From pure abstraction, her style evolved into semi-abstracted, Japanese-inflected landscapes. Crisscrossing and crescent-shape gestures stood in for grasses, clouds, snow, and poppies. Thin strips of vertical calligraphy, excerpting traditional haiku, sluiced down picture surfaces like raindrops. In Switzerland beginning in the early 1960s, Yokoi recognized in the country’s pristine landscapes the elements of Japanese landscapes that she had so loved and remembered from her past, but which were, by the 1960s, largely gone at the expense of post-war urbanization. Willy Rotzler, upon Yokoi’s artistic debut in the Swiss art world, described her paintings as “imaginary inner landscapes that do not exist in this form, neither here in the West nor in the Far East… pictorial and metaphorical concentrations of emotive devotion to the unutterable, to the experience.” The fact that Yokoi filtered much of her imagery through her memories of a no-longer-extant prewar Japan complicates that temporality further, tempering our confidence in the predictable shift of the seasons with awareness that even those things that seem most enduring will one day be irretrievably lost. Yokoi’s paintings preserve this transmuted reality, along with the knowledge that the only real certainty is the flickering glimmer of change. Once the Covid pandemic travel restrictions were lifted following her death, a special celebration was held at the Thun Castle in Schlossberg featuring her favorite motif, “Poppies” “. . .
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Kunsthalle Basel, 1964
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Walter Bodmer/Otto Tschumi/Teruko Yokoi
Curated by A. Rudinger 40 pp.
33 paintings exhibited / 6 illustrated
 
HINAGESHI written by Teruko Yokoi
1981
Artist's journal
 
Teruko Yokoi. Tokyo/New York/Paris/Bern
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Essays by Anke Kempkes, Osamu Okuda, Nina Zimmer et all.
The art and life of Japanese abstract painter Teruko Yokoi (born 1924) subverts the well-worn narratives of abstract expressionism in the US, Europe and Japan. Having studied modern art in Tokyo after World War II, in 1953 she relocated to San Francisco, a vibrant (if still critically neglected) hub for abstract painting, and entered the California School of Fine Arts, where only a few years earlier the influential Pacific School had begun to form. She then moved to New York where she studied with Hans Hoffman at the Art Student League, and began to create the beautifully colorful canvases, with their allusions to landscapes and floral motifs, for which she has become celebrated.
Berlin: Hatje Cantz (Bilingual Edition 2020) in collaboration with the Kunstmuseum, Bern. 163 pp. ISBN: 978-3775746823

TERUKO YOKOI by Anke Kempkes
This publication was prepared on the occasion of the exhibition Teruko Yokoi, which marks the first presentation of the Japanese painter in the United States since 1955.. Arriving in San Francisco in 1954, Yokoi spent a formative year at the California School of the Fine Arts entrenched in a milieu of artists and writers, developing a distinctly modern visual language. Upon receiving a grant for her studies in 1955, Yokoi moved to New York and enrolled in the school of the legendary German Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann. It was during this time that Yokoi met Kenzo Okada, an Abstract Expressionist Japanese-born painter working in America, who moved from Tokyo to New York in 1950. Okada, among many others, became friends with Mark Rothko, whom he introduced to Yokoi. In 1957, Yokoi met Sam Francis and the couple married in 1959 and welcomed their daughter that same year. Yokoi, Francis, and their daughter Kayo resided in the penthouse of the Chelsea Hotel alongside vanguards such as Joan Mitchell. At this juncture, Yokoi’s work grew increasingly concerned with the use of color, with the artist producing works that put varying colors in conversation with one another.
In 1960, Yokoi moved to Paris, and from abroad, participated in a group exhibition at the storied Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. It was in Paris where she would meet Arnold Rüdlinger, a meeting that would lead to her first major museum exhibition in Basel at the Kunsthalle in 1964. In 1962, the artist permanently relocated to Bern, Switzerland, where she would remain until her death in 2020.
New York: Marlborough Gallery. c 2024. 119 pp., 51 color plates
ISBN: 978-0-89797-456-1
 
Brooklyn Rail, April 2024
ArtSeen: Teruko Yokoi by Elizabeth Buhe
 
ARTFORUM, May 2024, Vol. 62, No. 9
Uncanny Sensation: Teruko Yokoi’s Search for Lost Time
By Richard Speer