Collection: 101 Posters (1980-84)

In 1980, my exhibition poster (Kijuro) received a special prize at the “Warsaw International Poster Biennale.” At that time, the Polish art magazine Projekt which covers internationally renowned contemporary artists and architects, sought to publish a special issue about me. It asked me to put together a special article and said it would place that poster in its permanent collection. The poster was reduced to 56x40cm in size; copies of it were printed, folded into four and inserted into each individual volume of the magazine. Having received a request for a second special issue, I produced from 1980 to 1984 conceptual posters that were each inspired by a word and produced by the silkscreen method. In the end, I created 101 posters in all.

The concept for this series was to see what becomes apparent when something is cast in doubt and set in opposition to what is believed to be self-evident; that is, to explore what a word means precisely or how ambiguous it is. My aim can be said to have been to explore not just the meaning of a concept but the possibility of converting that concept. At first, the humor in the work was one of my interests, but gradually that humorous element diminished and importance shifted to thinking about the concept itself. Those conceptual posters were collected in Projekt as requested and became a second collection. As with the first poster, copies of the NON! poster were inserted in each volume of the magazine.