Takeda Hideo’s Genpei: Defying Authority

The striking, saturated designs of the Genpei series of silk-screen prints by the Japanese artist Takeda Hideo (born 1948) will likely come as a surprise to visitors familiar with traditional Japanese woodblock prints of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They are perhaps even more unexpected, however, for viewers knowledgeable about their purported subject: the Genpei War (1180–85). The historical events of the war, Japan’s first major civil conflict, are most often encountered through their narrativization as The Tale of the Heike, an oral epic that was perpetuated by wandering musicians before being committed to text sometime in the fourteenth century. Since then, The Tale of the Heike has been endlessly retold and reinterpreted through plays, novels, poetry, film, and animation. While the original epic romanticizes the conflict through themes of valor, loss, and heroism, Takeda’s reimagining in Genpei prioritizes raw visual impact over narrative fidelity. Drawing on his long career as a satirical cartoonist, Takeda sharply undercuts the traditional romanticism associated with that epic. Instead of idealized heroes, the episodes he has selected highlight acts of cowardice, betrayal, and hubris—all featuring heavily tattooed, armored warriors subjugating naked civilians.

Takeda’s compositional skill is matched by the superlative technical level of the prints themselves, executed by master printer Taninaka Kazuo (born 1948). To create a silk screen, the printer transfers the design onto a series of gauze “screens,” with each screen used to print a different color. The elements of the design with each color are transferred onto the gauze via a photosensitive reagent and then exposed to light, creating gaps in the gauze through which pigment is applied to the surface. When all the screens are aligned and printed in sequence, the design is assembled like the parts of a puzzle. Due to the slick finish it creates, silk screen is often used in commercial spheres to create bold poster designs or T-shirt graphics. In the hands of a talented fine art printer, this relatively simple process is transformed into masterful complexity, a crowd of minute details in multiple colors and metallic pigments, requiring an almost unbelievable level of skill and precision to isolate each color in order to create the screens and print with flawless alignment. The detailed sections create a sharp contrast with the large areas of empty space—a characteristic feature of Takeda’s visual style—as can be seen in the clusters of warriors with their meticulously articulated tattoos and armor juxtaposed with blank backgrounds or fleshy, pillowy bodies undifferentiated by shading.

Takeda Hideo’s Genpei: Defying Authority is the first museum exhibition of the artist’s work in the United States. Although focusing on the Genpei series, it also includes other works from the artist’s career, particularly those that ridicule stereotypes of a harmonious, restrained Japan. This includes his illustrations of tattooed yakuza figures that further contextualize the anachronous full-body tattoos of the twelfth-century warriors in Genpei, reducing the valorized clash of the ages into a mere turf war between rival gangs. Takeda’s sharp sense of humor, particularly his tongue-in-cheek attitude toward national stereotypes of Japan, is on display in Moving Bonsai (ca. 2020) and World Night Tours: Japan (2015)—the latter part of a long-running series of poster-like designs ostensibly for his fake travel company, Takeda Trouble Travel, which feature many countries humorously reduced to national pastimes. The exhibition also considers the development of Takeda’s tendency to challenge established stereotypes against the background of the student protest movement in late 1960s Japan, particularly at the  university Takeda attended, Tama Art University in Tokyo. Faced with hypocritical actions of the government and a sense of having been betrayed by previous generations, many students rejected the social norms they had inherited at the most basic level. 

One of the most stimulating challenges for the exhibition and its accompanying publication was negotiating the tension between the artist’s insistence that his designs do not need accompanying explanatory or interpretive text, and the recognition that in the United States much of our audience is unfamiliar with The Tale of the Heike, alluded to in Genpei, thus making some additional context of the historical references necessary for a full appreciation of the idiosyncrasies of Takeda’s approach. In the exhibition, QR codes on the labels link to related excerpts from an English-language translation of The Tale of the Heike to provide literary background for the conventional understanding of the events depicted in the images. In the publication, we took a playful approach to design, incorporating a colored acrylic sheet that can be used to obscure the accompanying catalogue text, allowing the reader to appreciate the images alone or with interpretative explanations depending on their preference. Takeda’s disdain for text and many of his other insights are also discussed in a transcribed interview in the catalogue, provided in the original Japanese in order to preserve the artist’s unique voice, alongside an English translation. 

Whether visitors are already familiar with The Tale of the Heike or have no knowledge at all, we hope the exhibition will be surprising, subverting previous expectations of the presentation of Japanese history and the assumed conservatism of much Japanese art.