Illustration from the Genka (Fantasy Flowers) Series. Artist: Tadanori Yokoo. Culture: Japanese, 1974-1975. Medium: Monochrome drawing on paper. Collection: Artist's collection (on deposit at the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art), Kobe.
Yokoo created these black-and-white drawings for the historical novel Genka, which was serialized in the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper between 1974 and 1975. Written by author Harumi Setouchi, the text chronicled the political life of Tomiko Hino during the 15th-century Muromachi shogunate.
Yokoo added completely unconventional objects to the illustrations for this medieval Japanese storyline. Right next to the text on the newspaper page, readers saw UFO motifs, contemporary elements entirely unrelated to the story, and modern-era objects in Yokoo's drawings.
What's more, the artist refused to stick to the author's text during this production process. In fact, on some days, Yokoo had already submitted his drawing to the newspaper before Setouchi even finished writing the text for that installment. This working method transformed the drawings from simple visuals illustrating the story into completely independent graphic artworks. Prepared in tiny dimensions of just eight by fourteen centimeters for the newspaper print, these original sketches remained in closed boxes for a full forty years after they were published. It wasn't until December 2015 that all the original pieces were finally exhibited together for the first time at the museum in Kobe.