Yūichi Yokoyama

Internationally acclaimed, Yokoyama's work has been published and exhibited, among others, in France, the United States and South Korea.

Yokoyama was born in 1967 in Miyakonojō in Miyazaki Prefecture. While growing up, his family moved frequently, from Kyushu to Hokkaido to the Kanto region, due to his father's work. In 1986 he enrolled in Musashino Art University in oil painting. After graduation in 1990, he first focused on painting, but didn't have enough money to buy oil paint, so he used plywood and house paint instead. He applied for different art contests, but didn't get any prizes, and was rejected from contributing to public art exhibitions. Eventually, he won a contest by an illustration magazine instead and he started to work in illustration in order to make a living. Eventually, he gave up on art exhibitions and shifted his expression towards manga. He found it difficult to work with color and preferred black and white aesthetics, as typical in manga, and he found it easier to express time through serial pictures rather than single pictures. Yokoyama completely shifted his artistic focus to manga in 1995. He made his official debut as a manga artist in 2000 with "Pet" in the magazine Cyzo. The editor of the annual alternative manga magazine Comic Cue approached him and published several of his works in the 2000s. In 2002, he won the newcomer award of the manga magazine AX for the short story "Neo Taiiku". In 2010, he held his first solo exhibition at Kawasaki City Museum. In 2016, an exhibition titled The World is Strange! Takaaki Taishi + Yuichi Yokoyama: Manga and Painting was held at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, featuring work by both Yokoyama and artist Takaaki Taishi. Yokoyama has exhibited internationally, including at the Palais de Tokyo and several times at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Anne Barrault Gallery as well as the 2009 J-POP SUMMIT in San Francisco. His work has also been featured in the French newspaper Libération. His manga have been published and gained a following in Japan, the United States and France. The English-language editions of Garden and Iceland were nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Graphic Novel/Comics in 2011 and 2018 respectively. New Engineering was nominated for the Eisner Award for Best Short Story and the Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Asia in 2008. In parallel with his work as an author, he has undertaken a variety of projects: decorating a Toyota Prius for the Aichi Triennale in 2013, designing costumes for the Italian theater company Dewey Dell in 2013, and creating a window display for Hermès in Shinjuku in 2014. In 2021, as part of a project during the long-term renovation of the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, newly drawn manga panels by Yokoyama were displayed on signs and roadblock fences within Hijiyama Park.

Yokoyama’s manga are widely recognized as avant-garde manga and experimental. He described his distinct aesthetic as “neo manga” due to its radical departure from traditional storytelling and visual conventions. His works prioritize abstract, rhythmic compositions over narrative coherence, frequently eschewing character development, emotional expression, or human drama to create a sense of universality and detachment. His style has drawn international attention for its rejection of both manga orthodoxy and Western visual conventions, establishing him as a singular figure in contemporary comics and visual art.

Recurring themes in his manga include infrastructure, travel, sound, and mechanical repetition. In New Engineering, Yokoyama depicts large-scale construction work without context or explanation, using the visual language of manga to emphasize motion, structure, and transformation. In Travel, he illustrates an aimless train journey across stylized landscapes, completely devoid of dialogue or onomatopoeia, heightening the sense of disorientation and detachment. Iceland features abstracted interactions in an ambiguous setting. In Garden, an endless hallway transforms into a vast library filled with wordless picture catalogs, implying that a universe can be represented entirely through a sequence of images rather than text. In Garden and Outdoors, surveillance, drones, and mediated sensory networks foreground the complex relationship between humans, technology, and perception. Yokoyama asserts that the massive structures and landscapes within his stories "simply exist," and that he does not imagine any architects or creators behind them. The characters frequently pose questions that remain unanswered, reflecting Yokoyama’s belief that fiction does not require rational explanation. He describes this absence of resolution as more natural than the imposition of interpretive clarity, inviting readers to imagine their own meanings without the guidance of an overarching logic or authorial intention. Yokoyama’s work frequently explores the theme of portability, reflecting an interest in small, compact devices and spaces. His narratives and settings often involve multifunctional objects that transform between compressed and full-size forms, as seen in Outdoors (2009). This motif of miniaturization conveys a vision of the world as a playground where grand, sublime phenomena are distilled into manageable, childlike forms. According to manga scholar Ryan Holmberg, his comics blend the ideas of homo faber (man the maker) and homo ludens (man the player), emphasizing cyclical creation and destruction as a form of naïve, divine play.

• Title — Year — Notes — Refs • New Engineering (ニュー土木, New Doboku) — 2004 — Serialized in Comic Cue Published by East Press in 1 vol. Published in English by PictureBox • Travel (トラベル) — 2006 — Serialized in Comic Cue Published by East Press in 1 vol. Published in English by PictureBox • Garden (Niwa) — 2007 — Serialized in Comic Cue Published by East Press in 1 vol. Published in English by PictureBox • "Astronauts" (アストロノート) — 2009 — Short story published in Weekly Playboy • Baby Boom (ベビーブーム) — 2009 — Serialized in Comic Cue Published by East Press in 1 vol. Published in English by Breakdown Press • Outdoor (アウトドアー) — 2009 — Published by Kodansha in 1 vol. Published in English by Breakdown Press • Color Engineering — 2011 — Paintings published by PictureBox in 1 vol. • World Map Room (世界地図の間, Sekai Chizu no Ma) — 2013 — Published by East Press in 1 vol. Published in English by PictureBox • Fashion to Misshitsu (ファッションと密室) — 2015 — Published by 888Books in 1 vol. • Iceland (アイスランド) — 2017 — Published by 888Books in 1 vol. Published in English by Retrofit Comics • Plaza (プラザ) — 2019 — Published by 888Books in 1 vol. Published in English by Living the Line, LLC. • Moeru Oto (燃える音, "Burning Sound") — 2020 — Published by 888Books in 1 vol.