Disquiet

Have a good weekend

I first met the Japanese street photographer Yoshi Yubai back in late 2022 at the apartment of V. Vale in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. Vale is the founder of the storied publisher RE/Search Publications. I happened to notice a synthesizer on a table in Vale’s living room, and learned it belonged to his wife, Marian Wallace. As is inevitable, talk turned to music, and Yubai and I bonded over mutual favorites.

We kept in touch, and then last year, as he was putting thought into an upcoming collection of his work, he asked if I would write the essay for it. The book was published recently by Landslide, which is a Sydney, Australia, imprint run by Jake Wotherspoon. The book made its debut at the recent San Francisco Art Book Fair. Both Yubai and Wotherspoon were in attendance, and I spent several days during the fair at their table.

The pervasive theme in Yubai’s recent work, a few reproductions of which appear below, is “discommunication,” a concept of his that serves as the book’s title. Discommunication is a massive, sprawling document, each page 42 cm × 30 cm (16.5” × 11.8”), the pages a shiny silver, the images stark and evasive. While it is a photography book, it is one fueled by music, and its urban imagery naturally suggests the soundscapes of the unnatural environments that Yubai chronicles and creates.

With permission from Yubai and Wotherspoon, I am sharing here the text of my introduction for the first time outside of the book, which was printed in a limited edition of 120. My essay fills a page toward the end of the book and is broken into three sections. I am proud to have played my small role in the book’s production, and very much enjoyed observing from the sidelines as its development progressed.

Encounters

I once found myself at a dinner seated between a businessman and a graphic designer. During the meal, the businessman became increasingly wary whenever discussion turned to the designer’s profession. This tension was of the fleeting yet consequential sort that can occur when polarized individuals meet for likely the only time in their lives — a blunt snapshot, an emphatic moment, an elemental fissure.

Eventually, the businessman spoke his mind, concern having built up such steam that it demanded release. What he said was structured like a question, but leapfrogged to accusation. “So,” the businessman asked of the designer, “you’re telling me that you take ‘ideas’ and … then you express them … ‘visually’? You turn ideas into … images?”

The businessman’s pauses were troubling, like he felt his version of reality being yanked away, and he was doing his damnedest to pull it back to his side of whatever line he perceived had been drawn. The stakes seemed high — though perhaps only to him. His tone signaled that the graphic designer was either self-deluded or a fraud. I politely rose to the designer’s defense, but in the mind of the businessman, I clearly dug myself a hole right next to this person on whom he had focused his incredulity.

The incident feels like a modern day Aesop’s fable, one arriving by way of J. G. Ballard’s anthropological x-rays: a charged interaction between white-collar workers, a study in societal contrasts that borders on the violent — all due to the provisional status of the image.

Renderings

That images can and do express ideas seems self-evident to me, no less today than at the dinner decades ago. If anything, as time has progressed, aesthetics seem ever more like encapsulations of perspectives, concepts, ideologies, narratives, scenes, cultures. The very word “aesthetic,” for example, has shifted its form, morphed as culture has evolved, from noun to adjective, from described to descriptive.

For something to “be” “aesthetic” today means for it to have a sensibility that extends well beyond objects themselves, well beyond (mere) matters of design, and to stand for something akin to a statement, an ethos. At the least, something being approvingly recognized as “aesthetic” signals the presence of a coherent, consistent point of view — and the term can imply far more; being “aesthetic” can encompass, as it were, an entire worldview.

Such are these prints by Yoshi Yubai, an extraordinary street photographer from Japan’s Hiroshima Prefecture, and one who is fully grounded in global urban culture. Yubai, in this book, sets war mementos against storefront hallucinations, ominous structures against corrupted data, surveillance residue against damaged silhouettes — and it is all of a piece. The intense aesthetic — in the older sense of that word — of Yubai’s art takes two forms in particular. There is the work itself, and there is the way it connects past the realm of photography.

Street photography often aspires to capture the beauty in the broken and the mundane, to document fleeting moments that don’t so much defy as transcend classical conceptions of what is condoned to be aesthetically pleasing. By identifying essential subjects and shapes, figures and stories, textures and moods, in the everyday, Yubai’s street photography stakes a claim. There is the denuded affect of faces removed from any helpful context, the extreme saturation that elevates the simple to the iconic, and perhaps foremost, the emotional impact of a vision that is at once inspirational and post-apocalyptic.

Yubai then pushes those same subjects — whether generic models or battle sites, advertisements or street signage, car graveyards or images of images — further than their original forms suggested, often past the point of recognizability. These images are rendered — like with fat, reduced to vital components — in order to amplify any inherent texture, and to draw out the opportunities for abstraction, building back up from the elemental.

If in much street photography, a moment is captured for consideration, then in Yubai’s, those moments are starting points for serial reuse: layering, degradation, polarization.

Throughout, as his work takes on the impure patterning of a dying television screen, he retains the flavor of street photography. Rather than (merely) document a dingy alley or a seedy business corridor or a forlorn building, he summons their graffiti-coated spirits. In turn, the haphazard angles and violated surfaces of the environments he studies become fantastical works of art.

Generations

Yubai cites diverse resources for focusing his imagination, notably the pioneering computer graphics of Robert Abel. Countless generations of Moore’s Law have rendered Abel’s early animations quaint by comparison, perhaps — but those works share with Yubai’s contemporary prints an emphasis on willfully basic geometries that bleed surrealism.

Also in the passing years, as technology has made one consequential footfall after another, art has grappled with how to curb the monster. Cyberpunk recognized the rust in the machine, and set a precedent for the grit that Yubai ekes out in his imagery. The metallic surfaces and reflective qualities of his prints speak to digital dreams and artificial pleasures, to Mirrorshades appetites and Neuromancer bohemia.

Further along the way, glitch came to celebrate the beauty of systems tested well beyond their limits. Yubai finds camaraderie and regeneration in the glitch-inflected music of electronic acts like Oval and Autechre, which push their digital audio tools past intended purposes — until, like in his photography, the quotidian reveals itself as raw material for adulterated abstraction. Music fuels him. He identifies (and identifies with) a through-line back to the time of barebones bands like Suicide, which wrestled with fundamentals — the minimal, the electronic, the experimental, the febrile.

That proto-industrial era followed immediately on the heyday of Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory, a pronounced presence in this book, not just in subject matter (advertising, commerce, beauty, appropriation) but in presentation. Printed onto silver foil beneath a reflective gloss finish, the images glisten like the surface of still water, amplifying the book’s atmosphere, at once sharp and ambiguous.

Take that materiality into consideration. Discommunication is not simply a container for reproductions; the book itself functions as the work. Yubai explains that his images stand in deliberate opposition to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous “decisive moment,” the singular instant of clarity traditionally associated with photography. These photographs arrive instead through accumulation, degeneration, and prolonged processing. Moments are layered, repeated, inverted, and pushed toward abstraction until documentation gives way to something stranger: unstable images suspended between recognition and mirage. If Cartier-Bresson sought revelation through precision, Yubai embraces distortion and overload. These are anti-decisive moments — photographs that resist resolution.

And those are just some of the ideas, the perceptions, that infuse Yoshi Yubai’s art. The stark contrasts of his hypnotic images bounce between the familiar and the peculiar, the monotonous and violent, the wan and the strident. The viewer gets lost in compositions where processing has, literally, blurred the lines between object and atmosphere; this murkiness is the essence of discommunication. Architecture is mistaken for typography, concern for scale gives way to a fixation on the granular, and the nocturnal — that dominant environment of street photography — takes on the qualities of an x-ray.

Learn more about Yoshi Yubai’s book Discommunication at landslide.sydney. Follow his photography at instagram.com/yoshi_yubai and the publisher’s work at instagram.com/landslide_books.

Nine is a very small number but sure I’ll play along, and I no doubt will have a half dozen to switch in tomorrow.