OUGD501 - Research - Yoko Honda - 80s Inspired Illustration

The personal work of Yoko Honda is highly experimental and individual to the artist. It is clear that pastiche and parody are at play throughout her visual work. This work isn't commercial as such which is why it is interesting. It is a personal venture of the artist into pure aesthetics, directly influenced by trends and surfaces that have been previously accepted in mainstream visual culture. She is magnifying and amplifying stereotypical aesthetics associated with the 80's. She is in fact celebrating these aesthetics, but in doing so, she is contributing to a simulacrum. She is simulating environments which have no original reality, or reference, stylising them to replicate an aesthetic which had it's moment in the past. Its very intriguing, and contributes to a sense of nostalgia within visual culture. 

The 180's aesthetic has arguably become one of the biggest sources of inspiration for a lot of young creative's today, probably because they are yearning for an age which actually had a distinctive aesthetic style to it. Contemporary visual culture lacks this distinction. Yoko Honda’s artwork channels the aesthetics of the 1980s more so than anyone else I’ve come across. Her digital paintings pay homage to the garish and the gaudy, channelling an era of affluence and excess. The fact that she created them digitally further contributes to a sense of simulacrum and simulation, because the original references were most like created using primitive digital techniques, or were more likely to have been hand drawn or created using analogue processes. The self-taught artist hails from Tokyo but takes inspiration from the USA. “When anyone expresses the 80s,” she says, “there’s that element of Miami and California – you could say they’re the places that symbolise the 80s best (the place of the dream).”