Background
Daisuke Yokota was born in 1983 in Saitama, Japan.
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Daisuke Yokota
Edit ProfileEducation
In 2003 Daisuke graduated from the Nippon photography institute.
Career
Yokota is part of a generation of young artists using photography in subversive new ways. His approach combines multiple rephotographing and printing, applying acid or flame to the end results, and making one-off prints and books from unexpected materials in staged public performances. Alongside Hiroshi Takizawa, Yokota produced 50 photobooks in a special live performance as part of the "Self Publish Be Happy’s 10th birthday event" at Offprint London in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.
Yokota is working out of, and pushing forward, a Japanese tradition of photobook-making and performance that harks back to the visceral experimentation of the Provoke generation and the work of the relentless photobook-maker Daido Moriyama. One could also link Yokota conceptually to the iconoclastic Mono-ha movement of the late 60s and early 70s, where sculptural raw materials included sand, glass, soil, cotton and even paraffin, as well as traditional stone and metals.
Yokota has produced several acclaimed, and almost immediately hard-to-find photobooks, including Linger and Vertigo. His process is meticulous to the point of obsessive. He shoots on a compact digital camera, prints and rephotographs the results on medium-format film, then prints them again several times using heat and light to mark or distort the images. At Photo London, his Japanese gallery G/P is showing some intimate monochrome nude studies that appear both vintage-looking – with traces of John Coplans’ nudes – and boldly contemporary. It also has a strange sculptural piece that seems to flow off the wall in shards of thick-coloured photographic paper.
An early series from 2012, Back Yard, was shot in the backyard of Yokota’s home-cum-studio in Tokyo, but looks otherworldly, like much of his work. Ghostly, ethereal figures stand in a blurred grey landscape, or seem to have auras around their heads. Yokota stands out, too, because his results tend transcend the sum of the parts. Or, to put it more brutally, his creative process does not (as with so many emerging young artists) appear more interesting than the results. The idea, execution and final work are all of an equal and often mysterious intensity. Recently he is working as a member of an international artists collective “AM projects.”
Achievements
Works
Views
Daisuke's work is defined by its dark, ethereal aesthetic that sits somewhere between an erotic dream and a horror film.
Quotations: "There are no stories in my work. There is only what the viewers find within it for themselves. I am more interested in exploring time and multiple possibilities that exist in reality."
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Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Daisuke Yokota is one of the most innovative and experimental young photographers working in the world today.
