Angura - Poster Japanese Avant-Garden

The works reproduced here are the results of a particularly fruitful (and profitless) collaboration in the '60s and the '70s between underground theater artists (including Tadanori Yokoo). The epicenter seems to have been the volatile Shinjuku neigborhood in Tokyo-the same scene that forms the basis for Oshima's 1969 Dairy of Shinjuku Thief, The obvious analogy for the posters is the San Franciscan psychedelic stuff, but unique tensions emerge here, largely, I assume, because the Japanese theater companies were far more marginalized and politically radical entities than American pop musicians. The inspiration actually seems to be less drugs and more Mao: design elements and distortions of text play on peculiarly Asian historical tensions-the desire to "overcome the modern with the premodern." Pop, including the Beatles, however, plays a large role in all this. Of particular interest to Californians is a poster Yokoo designed for Terayama's The Hunchback of Aomori, which borrows (and defaces) its design from the front page of Rafu Shimpo, the Los Angeles-based Japanese American community newspaper.