A stunning exploration of a landmark series of prints by one of Japan’s most inventive contemporary artists

Takeda Hideo has worked across media throughout his long career, from painting and print design to cartooning, photography, and sculpture. Enormously flexible, endlessly surprising, and often surreal, his work injects dark humor into a wide range of subjects, with a touch of irreverence and incorporating elements of sexuality, distortion, and dynamic composition. This book examines the body of work for which Takeda is best known, Genpei, a series of silkscreens portraying battle scenes from the twelfth-century Genpei War.

Kit Brooks looks at the ways in which the series challenges the romanticization of war and long-standing attitudes about Japan’s classical past. Previous scholarship has often characterized Genpei as a successor to a long tradition of representing The Tale of the Heike, a Japanese literary classic that narrativizes the Genpei War and romanticizes the conflict. Takeda’s selection of episodes overwhelmingly highlights acts of betrayal, cowardice, and cruelty on the part of the samurai “heroes.” Brooks argues that the series is part of a wider twentieth-century turn that challenged the perpetuation of outdated and hypocritical values of the samurai in Japanese society, thus positioning Takeda as a forerunner to well-known international artists like the global phenomenon Murakami Takashi, who have similarly reworked historical Japanese aesthetics with a flat, comic-like visuality as a means to address contemporary social issues.

The first major book in English on the artist in several decades, Takeda Hideo’s “Genpei” features an interview with the artist in both English and Japanese.

Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum