James Fuentes Gallery Revisits Teruko Yokoi’s Transpacific Abstraction

Teruko Yokoi’s decades-spanning practice returns to Los Angeles with A Pacific Line, a new exhibition at James Fuentes Gallery tracing the Japanese-Swiss painter’s singular path through postwar abstraction. Marking her first solo presentation in the city in more than four decades, the show carries particular resonance on the West Coast: Yokoi first arrived in the United States by ship in 1954, shortly after the end of the U.S. occupation of Japan, before enrolling at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. That self-directed move became the starting point for a career shaped by continual relocation across Japan, the United States, France and Switzerland, while resisting easy placement within any single school or movement. Bringing together works made between 1954 and 2005, A Pacific Line presents Yokoi’s practice as an ongoing conversation between traditional Japanese aesthetics and postwar Western modernism.

Yokoi’s early years in the U.S. marked a decisive shift from figuration toward the highly personal abstraction that would come to define her work. “Pose” from 1954 still retains the contours of a seated human figure, but its body already begins to dissolve into blocks of orange, gray and brown, anticipating her increasingly rhythmic treatment of form and color.

After moving to New York in 1955, she studied with Hans Hofmann, attended the Art Students League and moved within circles that included Joan Mitchell, Kenzo Okada and Mark Rothko, while living for a period at the Chelsea Hotel with painter Sam Francis. Yet her work remained distinct from the dominant language of Abstract Expressionism. Paintings such as 1960’s “Shizen–Natur,” with its deep green field, saturated blue forms and streaks of red and white, reveal a vocabulary grounded as much in Japanese calligraphy, haiku and observations of nature as in gestural abstraction. Yokoi herself described her paintings as “poems written in colors,” a sentiment rooted in childhood walks through the Kiso River landscape and early lessons in calligraphy and poetry from her father.

The exhibition also follows Yokoi’s material evolution after settling permanently in Bern in 1962, where she maintained an exceptionally consistent studio practice until her death in 2020. Works such as “Herbstwald” (1965) and “Lauschen II (Nocturne)” (1969) use elongated vertical formats and concentrated fields of red, black and blue to turn landscape into something atmospheric and nearly musical, while later works increasingly explore paper and egg tempera.

By the mid-1970s, Yokoi had embraced the demanding medium, eventually incorporating hand-mixed pigments, pearlescent minerals and metallic elements that shift according to light and viewing position. The 1993 diptych “Ohne Titel”, for instance, expands this approach across luminous fields of yellow, blue, green and silver, while preserving the calligraphic lines and natural rhythms that connect her earliest and latest paintings. Organized in collaboration with Emerald Room | Emerald Editions and Kent Fine Art, Teruko Yokoi: A Pacific Line is on view at James Fuentes Gallery, 5015 Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, through November 7, 2026.