Takeda Hideo's Genpei: Defying Authority
Takeda Hideo 武田 秀雄, The Final Illness of Taira Kiyomori (Taira Kiyomori no byōshi 平清盛病死), from the series Genpei 源平, 1985. Princeton University Art Museum. Museum purchase, Mary Trumbull Adams Art Fund. © Takeda Hideo. Image courtesy Ronin Gallery.
Princeton University Art Museum
Princeton, NJ 08544USA
A contemporary artist’s irreverent take on The Tale of the Heike, the epic narrative about a famed Japanese civil war.
With an acerbic sense of humor and a bold graphic style, Takeda Hideo (b. 1948) has an international reputation for exaggerated, erotic aesthetics. These tendencies are vividly apparent in his best-known work, Genpei, a series of twenty-two silkscreen prints that radically reimagines the late twelfth-century Genpei civil war (1180–1185) between two rival clans in Japan. The war is well-known through its narrativization as the literary classic The Tale of the Heike, which has exerted a profound influence on Japanese art, literature, performance, and film since its first compilation in the early fourteenth century.
The Tale of the Heike is conventionally understood as a romantic narrative of loyalty, sacrifice, and valor. However, Takeda’s reinterpretation focuses on selected episodes that emphasize acts of cruelty, betrayal, cowardice, and arrogance. His Genpei is a nonliteral, non-comprehensive reimagining of The Tale of the Heike, using searing colors and bold lines to convey complex narratives with his characteristic clarity. This exhibition re-situates Takeda’s series within his career as a satirical cartoonist and in relation to a broader tendency to challenge outdated stereotypes and hypocritical values amid a wave of social and political upheaval in late twentieth-century Japan.
