During the late 1960s Japanese graphic artist Yokoo he began combining traditional Japanese imagery with psychedelic, erotic, and pop-cultural iconography to forge a kaleidoscopic style all his own.

With this poster for the Ankoku Butoh-ha dance company, Yokoo began a long collaboration with Tokyo’s avant-garde theater movement. The work displays a mix of classical Japanese and Western references. The background is formed by ocean waves and the rising sun (the emblem of the Japanese Empire and an essential element in Yokoo’s repertoire). Two female bathers (drawn from a notorious sixteenth-century French painting from the Fontainebleau school) reach for bonbons, while Japan’s famous bullet train races along the top edge.

Despite the eclecticism of the collage elements, the work is tightly organized and geometric, and it exemplifies the basic method that Yokoo adopted for most of his posters.