There is a face Tadanori Yokoo loves. It's the angelic face of a youth, maybe around ten years old. "It's the face of innocence," he says, "and purity, and reverence towards something great, like God." He met it first on the cover of Shonen, a magazine he used to read as a kid. The Japanese postal and police services still use it to inspire the Japanese to goodness of heart and purity of action. To my western eyes, it's like a hologram, alternately powerful, as it is meant, and totally kitsch. For Yokoo, it is still a compelling image, and is one of the many things that moves him to speak of ideals.

"That face is the ideal form of a human being," says Yokoo. "because one must have those elements, of innocence and purity, and reverence. Of course, only young children have that face, because, as we all know, every time ideals collide with reality, they crumble a little. Still, as a symbol, it's perfect." Yokoo's work, with its thesaurus of symbolic images that he's made his own, from every culture he's seriously considered, pictures this very clash of ideals and reality. In a book on collage technique done 20 years ago, he said, "as I lay down the images, I'm testing them against an ideal world I hold in my mind. Because I sense the imbalance in the world around me, I unconsciously tend towards balance and symmetry, two methods of expressing the ideal world. Sometimes I go too far, and wish later that I'd left some images jutting out over the borders."

From the first time he read Yukio Mishima, Yokoo felt a spiritual link with the novelist. In the other, each found an understanding of the concern that life and art be linked. Each was deeply interested in what happens when reality and ideals clash.

In the following excerpt from an exhibition catalogue, Mishima pinpoints the effect of the collision between Yokoo's inner world and the images of the outer one. "[Yokoo's] work has all the unbearability of the Japanese. His work angers people, and scares them, with its vulgar colors. It's scary how much his [common billboard] colors resemble the Coca Cola ones. Yet while average people don't want to look at them, it makes them look....

"In the darkness of these bright colors, there's something solemn and deep. Like in the circus tightrope walker's spangled panties, there is something pathetic, a solemnity. The womb of our national anthem bares her teeth and frightens people. What makes Yokoo's work not just the art of a madman is his interest in the world around him. For example, the parody he achieves through the brutal treatment of the common. In this ruinous working of his inner world, the vulgar is scorned. It is not just the inner world, however; in exploding outward, it becomes a parody and makes us laugh. It is this that makes it healthy.

"Even so, even if he becomes international, I hope he doesn't let go of the strange map of our Japan."