MOCA Focus: Takako Yamaguchi is the third exhibition in the recently relaunched MOCA Focus series, which presents an artist’s first solo museum show in Los Angeles and centers on new or discrete bodies of work. Born in Okayama, Japan, in 1952, Yamaguchi moved to the U.S. in the early 1970s and began to appropriate imagery from sources as diverse as Mexican muralism, Renaissance art, Japanese Nihonga, and Art Nouveau in ornate paintings that pose a challenge to rigid notions of ethnic identity and cultural ownership. At age seventy-two, the Los Angeles–based artist is synthesizing the motifs she has developed over the past forty years in a series of archly stylized oil-and-bronze-leaf seascapes featured in this exhibition. Yamaguchi’s precise yet luscious paintings incorporate her “Eastern” and “Western”-influenced vocabulary of abstract zigzags, spirals, and braids to denote natural forms like rain, waves, and mountains, representing a culmination of her decades-long provocations of style, taste, and identity.

MOCA Focus: Takako Yamaguchi is accompanied by a Nimoy Emerging Artist Publication Series catalogue, marking the artist’s first monograph.

MOCA Focus: Takako Yamaguchi is organized by Anna Katz, Senior Curator, with Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo, Curatorial Assistant.

Lead support is provided by the MOCA Global Council.

Generous support is provided by Ortuzar, New York.

Additional support is provided by the Pasadena Art Alliance, Pam Smith, Stephanie and Leon Vahn, and Amedeo Ursini.



Publication support is provided by the Nimoy Fund for Emerging Artists.

Exhibitions at MOCA are supported by the MOCA Fund for Exhibitions with major funding provided by Tatiana Botton, The Goodman Family Foundation, Alfred E. Mann Charities, and Alicia Miñana and Robert Lovelace. Generous funding is provided by Michael and Zelene Fowler, The Earl and Shirley Greif Foundation, Pamela and Jarl Mohn, Jonathan Segal, the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family Foundation, and Pamela West.