Harumi Yamaguchi

Harumi's Summer

06 July 2018 — 25 August 2018

Ginza Graphic

PARCO—a retail chain that emerged in the early 1970s—transcended the parameters of a commercial establishment and became a social phenomenon. Harumi Yamaguchi from the outset participated in the production of PARCO’s advertising as an illustrator, instantly bringing her squarely into the limelight. The women she depicted—“Harumi Gals”—while comprising an integral part of PARCO’s advertising strategy, greatly inspired the women of the day, who were eagerly searching for new lifestyles. The energy of the strong, positive, lithe Harumi Gals, bursting from Yamaguchi’s canvases, even today, when their role as advertisements has long ended, continue to fascinate us as vividly as ever.

This exhibition, titled Harumi’s Summer, was suggested by Harumi Yamaguchi herself as an event for summer 2018, with graphic artist and art director YOSHIROTTEN serving as her collaborator. The show has been possible because each and every work by Yamaguchi is imbued with a universal power that never loses its brilliance, even after it has become divorced from its original purpose. Her representative works drawn by airbrush, her series of 62 females created for PARCO using myriad techniques of expression, her beautiful illustrations featured in Seiko Tanabe’s biography of novelist Nobuko Yoshiya, her elegant horses for the Japan Racing Association (JRA)—these and the many other masterpieces Yamaguchi has contributed through the years, approaching each subject with dedicated sincerity and working them up with carefully chosen techniques, will be trimmed and reconfigured from YOSHIROTTEN’s unique perspective.

Harumi Yamaguchi

A leading name in the world of Japanese advertising, she pioneered the highly dramatic but elusively flat airbrush aesthetic closely associated with commercial illustration. Harumi Yamaguchi’s practice places her in the vanguard of new painterly practices and as a celebrated documenter of an emerging feminist aesthetic from the 1970s onwards.

Born in Matsue in the Shimane prefecture, Yamaguchi graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts in oil painting. She began her career as a freelance illustrator, spearheading the advertising for the renowned retail establishment PARCO. From its outset, PARCO was established to combine a commercial retail establishment with a cultural facility, combining platforms such as museum, theatre, and publishing in addition to retail. Yamaguchi’s role as engineer of the project’s mise-en-scène places her in the center of art and design in Japan.

As one of the original gyaru — commonly known also as “Shibuya Girls” rising from out ūman ribu or the feminist movements of the 1970s and generally applied to professionally-empowered but trend-conscious young women— Yamaguchi’s position at PARCO gave her license to portray an emerging cosmopolitan woman, liberated from the vestiges of traditional femininity and empowered through consumerism to define her own individuality. “Harumi’s gals” are often active and in motion — be it throwing a ball or swimming in a crystal blue pool — and returning the gaze of the viewer.

As Chizuko Ueno noted in her essay published in connection to “Women of the 70s PARCO Poster Exhibition 1969-1986”, an exhibition that took place at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, “while appearing to adhere to the scenario of male-tailored eroticism, Yamaguchi deconstructs male desire through her exaggerative depictions. As a consequence, the female body is idealised to a realm unreachable by male hands”.

Yamaguchi’s works are in the collections of: CCGA Graphic Art Center; Fukushima Kawasaki City Museum, Kanagawa, Japan; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

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