“The story of Teruko Yokoi is one of passion, curiosity, and persistence. It is also an account of the experience of an artist who has worked despite and through the wounds of history, geography, race, and gender,” writes the Kunstmuseum Bern.
By the time she moved to San Francisco in 1954, Ms. Yokoi had been a trained calligraphist and painter in her native Japan. Two years later she moved to New York, the epicenter of Abstract Expressionism, and studied with instructor Julian Levi here at The League in 1956.
In 2020, the exhibit Tokyo–New York–Paris–Bern focused on Ms. Yokoi’s works from this period in the mid-1950s through the late 1960s: “Stretched between cities on three continents, between Western abstraction and Japanese tradition, they capture Teruko Yokoi in a moment fully committed to creation.”
In her prolific career she had over 80 solo exhibitions world-wide and has two museums dedicated to her works in Japan. Ms. Yokoi recently passed away in October 2020 at the age of 96.
Check out this video of Ms. Yokoi at the Kunstmuseum, Bern: