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Color Engineering
Comic artist Yuichi Yokoyama (born 1967) draws wordless narratives of scenarios that verge on visual abstraction. Stripped of any detail that might orient them in the past, present or future, they record the self-determined activities of machines and architectural structures in a pre- or post-human universe. With his fourth volume for PictureBox, designed and edited by the artist himself, Yokoyama broaches significant new terrain: color! Color Engineeringreproduces both older and unseen imagery from the 2000s with dozens of color drawings and paintings that were executed in 2010 during a six-week open studio event held in Tokyo, at which the public was able to view Yokoyama at work. A selection of these canvases is reproduced here as gatefold pages, and is integrated among comic-strip sequences executed in a variety of techniques: photography, loose marker drawings, hyper-real portraiture and much more. These sequences continue his investigations into the world of machines, architecture and post-human fashion, and are the first Yokoyama narratives to provide insight into the artist's personal world, in details of his rural habitat.
200 pages, Paperback
First published September 22, 2011
3 people are currently reading
168 people want to read
About the author
Yuichi Yokoyama
25 books67 followersYuichi Yokoyama is a Japanese cartoonist and visual artist.
Yokoyama was born in 1967 in Miyazaki. He graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Musashino Art University in 1990 and initially pursued a career in fine arts.
Towards the end of the 90's Yokoyama turned his focus to manga. His cartooning style, blending modernist abstraction and comics, has been described as "neo-manga". His work has appeared in the alternative magazines Comic Cue, Mizue and Saizô. Among his books are New Engineering (2004), Travel (2006), Garden (2007), Outdoors (2009), Baby Boom (2009), World Map Room (2013), Iceland (2016) and Plaza (2019). Many of his manga have been translated in English and French.
Presently, Yokoyama is also active as a contemporary artist and an illustrator for the press and publishing houses in various countries.
Yokoyama was born in 1967 in Miyazaki. He graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Musashino Art University in 1990 and initially pursued a career in fine arts.
Towards the end of the 90's Yokoyama turned his focus to manga. His cartooning style, blending modernist abstraction and comics, has been described as "neo-manga". His work has appeared in the alternative magazines Comic Cue, Mizue and Saizô. Among his books are New Engineering (2004), Travel (2006), Garden (2007), Outdoors (2009), Baby Boom (2009), World Map Room (2013), Iceland (2016) and Plaza (2019). Many of his manga have been translated in English and French.
Presently, Yokoyama is also active as a contemporary artist and an illustrator for the press and publishing houses in various countries.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
March 4, 2016
Comic artist Yuichi Yokoyama draws wordless narratives of scenarios that verge on visual abstraction. Narratives? Even the narratives are stripped down to the bare minimum. Very few images of humans, no dialogue, though there is movement, and certainly color. No digital work at all. We are told that many of these images were produced in 2006 at a Tokyo gathering where people observed him making the paintings. They're in this volume then sequenced. It's abstract art, experimental.
There's a variety of techniques, so it is not coherent or anything. Some are hyper-real, some are rough, some are cartoonish. There's a lot of drawing of architecture and machines, as with previous books, but this has. .. . uh, color. Vivacity. It is very attractive, but someone also put it in the category of post-human, which means among other things that the art isn't warm and cuddly and personal. In this one there are rural scenes, though, and the artist lives in a rural area, so there's maybe some personal element to it all, finally.
This is the third book I've read by Yokohama, and I gave three stars to the first two, I didn't know what to make of them, they didn't affect me much emotionally one way or the other. But now there's a kind of cumulative effect/affect they are starting to have on me. They are not supposed to be conventional tales, they are more about shape and color and design as meaning-making than about the human world. Very interesting, right? The more I think I understand the work, the more I am beginning to appreciate it. Now I am still just a bit of a bystander, admiring what I see. I can say the work feels very new to me, very original, and that he calls it comics makes it interesting, reflective on the very nature of comics and art themselves. Like Brian Chippendale's stuff, and so on.
The review by Matt Seneca below in the Comics Journal and the interview with him below are very helpful, and perhaps more importantly, you can see whether you might be interested in checking out this guy's work, as you get to see some of his actual pages in both these reviews; also, in the interview you can hear him taking about his work, though he's not that helpful in interpreting the work:
http://www.tcj.com/yokoyamas-rubicon-...
http://comicsalliance.com/yuichi-yoko...
There's a variety of techniques, so it is not coherent or anything. Some are hyper-real, some are rough, some are cartoonish. There's a lot of drawing of architecture and machines, as with previous books, but this has. .. . uh, color. Vivacity. It is very attractive, but someone also put it in the category of post-human, which means among other things that the art isn't warm and cuddly and personal. In this one there are rural scenes, though, and the artist lives in a rural area, so there's maybe some personal element to it all, finally.
This is the third book I've read by Yokohama, and I gave three stars to the first two, I didn't know what to make of them, they didn't affect me much emotionally one way or the other. But now there's a kind of cumulative effect/affect they are starting to have on me. They are not supposed to be conventional tales, they are more about shape and color and design as meaning-making than about the human world. Very interesting, right? The more I think I understand the work, the more I am beginning to appreciate it. Now I am still just a bit of a bystander, admiring what I see. I can say the work feels very new to me, very original, and that he calls it comics makes it interesting, reflective on the very nature of comics and art themselves. Like Brian Chippendale's stuff, and so on.
The review by Matt Seneca below in the Comics Journal and the interview with him below are very helpful, and perhaps more importantly, you can see whether you might be interested in checking out this guy's work, as you get to see some of his actual pages in both these reviews; also, in the interview you can hear him taking about his work, though he's not that helpful in interpreting the work:
http://www.tcj.com/yokoyamas-rubicon-...
http://comicsalliance.com/yuichi-yoko...
September 20, 2014
Like a bridge spanning an underwater forest that's been constructed from a hollow metal pipe which can be rolled into place so it also serves as the entrance to a secret underground tunnel, "Color Engineering" straddles the chasms that typically divide visual art monograph, manga, architectural manual, and adventure narrative.
There are shards of a simple story here - strange characters traversing even odder landscapes - that will be familiar to readers of Yokoyama's previous books. But what's different is how the book continually explodes into rapturous sections of painted watercolors, photography, and brightly colored graphics. The point isn't to follow the sporadic plot so much as get ravished by the beauty of the author's visionary designs.
Reading "Color Engineering" is an exercise in navigating that shimmering zone between story and pure abstraction. I don't entirely understand this book, but I know it's one of the most gorgeous tomes I own.
There are shards of a simple story here - strange characters traversing even odder landscapes - that will be familiar to readers of Yokoyama's previous books. But what's different is how the book continually explodes into rapturous sections of painted watercolors, photography, and brightly colored graphics. The point isn't to follow the sporadic plot so much as get ravished by the beauty of the author's visionary designs.
Reading "Color Engineering" is an exercise in navigating that shimmering zone between story and pure abstraction. I don't entirely understand this book, but I know it's one of the most gorgeous tomes I own.
September 23, 2019
Great tips for WRITING code. This is a keeper and should be reviewed at least annually.
June 26, 2024
One of the odder Yuichi Yokoyama books, and that's saying something. It feels like its unfinished, just sketches and incomplete passages (brings to mind something the Al Columbia's Pim and Francie) - it's unfinished but intentionally so. Great to look at, but I feel like it's missing something for me to really connect with the work.
March 24, 2023
Matt Seneca's review of the work is well written. http://www.tcj.com/yokoyamas-rubicon-...
March 19, 2021
Yokoyama's use of color is just absolutely fantastic. The comics in this volume weren't my favorite, perhaps too fragmented, but that didn't stop this from being an absolutely pleasure to flip through. The paintings, the watercolors, the strange images inserted into frames. A wild, unclassifiable work.
December 14, 2020
Both oddly charming and charmingly odd. More a series of interesting images than a story (linear or otherwise); still it read much better once I correctly identified the proper orientation and direction of reading. The author's explanation of scenes at the end were interesting to read after reading the content, but I wouldn't recommend reading them before you've made your way through the book without them.
November 26, 2020
Can't recover from such marvelous beauty, overwhelmingly grandiose. Waw!
January 31, 2023
More enjoyable for me the more kinetic/messy/polystylistic/generally anarchic it was, culminating in a kind of totally-new-to-me and totally amazing expressionist suprematism, flashfusing monoliths into a single spinning real. Text and direct human involvement seem so unnecessary, a pre-existent parallax, that they feel almost like an argument against themselves, or for many moments away. The exception is at the end and largely pink and blue. Run/jump/shout/etc!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews