MOCA Focus: Takako Yamaguchi

MOCA Focus: Takako Yamaguchi is the third exhibition in the recently relaunched MOCA Focus series. Born in Okayama, Japan, in 1952, Yamaguchi moved to the US 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 LA–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.

Begun in 1992, the original MOCA Focus was dedicated to presentations of distinct bodies of work by artists working in all media and featured a roster of distinguished local and international artists, including Renée Green (1993), Franz West (1994), Margaret Honda (1994–5), Toba Khedoori (1997), Catherine Opie (1997–8), and Jorge Pardo (1998). MOCA Focus quickly became core to the museum's mission and identity as the artist's museum. Over a subsequent three-year period in the mid-2000s, the series was revived briefly but powerfully, featuring primarily LA-based artists and representing the first LA museum exhibition for artists including Eric Wesley (2006), Lecia Dole-Recio (2006), Alexandra Grant (2007), and Sterling Ruby( 2008). With this relaunch MOCA provides artists a critical opportunity to have their first solo museum exhibition in LA, which includes a monographic catalogue.

MOCA Focus: Takako Yamaguchi is organized by Anna Katz, Senior Curator, with Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo, Curatorial Assistant, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.