Takako Yamaguchi

Egan and Rosen is pleased to present Takako Yamaguchi: Smoking Women, featuring two paintings made by Yamaguchi in 1994-1995.

Takako Yamaguchi is an artist who has built a career through a series of fearless bodies of work that relentlessly challenge the status quo with overwhelming beauty and charisma. In these two paintings from her series of works featuring pensive women holding lit cigarettes and accompanied by cats, Yamaguchi constructs a sensual altar to the interstitial moment of philosophical contemplation that accompanies the pleasure of smoking. Combining the decorative strategies of Japanese folding screens and kimono design with gold, bronze, and silver leaf echoes of Secessionist muses under hallucinatory depictions of psychedelic smoke, Yamaguchi’s paintings render the possibility of imagination in tones of calm, cool enjoyment. The beauty of smoking, a cinematic trick of the last century, arises from within this state of meditative awareness: time standing still, or the “cigarette break” offered to the daily wage against the otherwise unyielding workday. Simultaneously, these works exuberantly refute the western canon’s interpretation of Japanese culture as inherently minimal, gliding into view with a vulgarian aesthetic against the headwinds of commercially successful norms in contemporary painting. Also embedded within the work is a reflection of the mid-90’s culture wars, when conservative politician Jesse Helms acted as a reverse arbiter of taste in art. Yamaguchi, rather than provoke from within the safety of the status quo, instead “set out to make paintings only a tobacco state senator could love.” Circling the drain on Yamaguchi’s brilliant false flag operation reveals Edward Bernay’s manipulation of the suffragette movement to break the taboo against women smoking in service of corporate skullduggery, just as smoking rode into the sunset of the counter culture on the back of the Marlboro Man. These paintings constitute one of the most brilliant major bodies of work made by any artist in America at that time.

Takako Yamaguchi (b. 1952, Okayama, Japan; lives in Santa Monica, California) is currently featured in With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985 at the Hessel Museum of Art through November 28, 2021.