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.
