I Wish You Were So Ugly Just Like Me
Yusuke Okada
Captured Tracks and Omnian Publishing are proud to present, I Wish You Were So Ugly Just Like Me, a collection of drawings and paintings by Yusuke Okada, a Japanese artist living in New York City who has positioned himself as both a staple and a fringe artist in the independent music scene.
This debut monograph is a concise introduction to Okada's whimsy and wit as a visual artist. The dramas and stresses of city life play out in scenes and portraits of mordant, sometimes-grotesque humor: flagrant and hilarious New Yorker covers from an alternate, genital-obsessed universe; a brief comic strip about the severed lower half of a man, which embarks on a binge of id-indulging bad behavior before being shot by a cop; a series involving a peep hole that is more concerned with the parts unseen.
Moments of sweetness (a guitar-strumming mouse perched on the shoulder of his accordion-playing cat sweetheart) lighten pages of bleakness and sorrow (pulpy crimes of passion and suicides). Perhaps the most arresting images come from a series of large-scale drawings of shadowy and pained figures that seem tangled within the lines of city streets and skyscrapers.
This limited first edition features a hand silk-screened wraparound jacket, as well as an introduction written by Keegan Mills Cooke.
