Gōzō Yoshimasu has been at the forefront of Japanese poetry for over six decades. Experimenting with words, type, and punctuation, and incorporating fragments of foreign tongues and found texts, his poems celebrate the riotous multiplicity of language. At the same time, Yoshimasu imbues his compositions with a transcendent urgency as he reports on his physical and intellectual journeys. In “Princess Weaver,” for example, a visit to a mining town in northern Japan occasions the following observation: “Long ago, standing in the smell of several hundred tons of lime, blue flowers, shellfish too fossils of fish too, the Aoume Line went down the mountain bit by bit.”¹

Yoshimasu’s creative practice extends beyond the printed page to performances, photography, moving images, and sound recordings. In his performances, Yoshimasu reinterprets his poems through vocalizations, bodily gestures, chance operations – such as wearing bells suspended from his teeth with string – and collaborations with other artists. In 2006 he began making videos with a handheld digital camera. The videos typically feature Yoshimasu’s excited meditations on art and life in response to locations ranging from the Watts Towers in Los Angeles to the US military’s Yokota Air Base near his childhood home in Tokyo. Many of his works move fluidly between different states, as with his copper plates and scrolls inscribed with words and other motifs, which become both scores and instruments in his performances.

In recent years, Yoshimasu was profoundly affected by the Tohoku earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident of March 11, 2011. The catastrophe inspired the mixed-media project Dear Monster (2012-2016) – presented at the 36th Bienal – comprising over 600 manuscripts of handwritten text, drawings, marks, and collaged elements. The bulk of the work is dedicated to transcriptions of writings by the postwar-era poet and thinker Takaaki Yoshimoto, a mentor of Yoshimasu’s, who died in March 2012. Manifesting the “poetic obligation” of a survivor, Yoshimasu’s transcriptions recall the devotional act of copying out Buddhist sutras while also suggesting a translation or renewal of the source text. Yet much of the underlying text is rendered illegible by quasi-calligraphic splashes of vibrantly colored paint, which manifest the explosive convergence of creation and destruction, remembering and forgetting – in a word, overwriting – inherent to text itself. Dear Monster has, in turn, led to subsequent projects Fire Embroidery (2016-2018), New Dear Monster (2016-2022), and Voix (2019-2020).