Hudson Valley Yōkai

Saunders Farm 2015

New World Yōkai

By Curt Belshe and Lise Prown, 2015

Yōkai (妖怪, ghost, phantom, strange apparition) are a class of supernatural monsters in Japanese folklore. The word yōkai is made up of the kanji for “bewitching; attractive; calamity” and “apparition; mystery; suspicious”. Yōkai are also precursors of Pokemon and other creatures of contemporary Japanese pop culture.

Our “Yokai” are creatures that blend current technological obsessions, urban legends, cartoonlike features and familiar animals. We have designed several “New World Yōkai” that reflect these spirits that lurk in the valley from the river valleys, to the Hudson Highlands, to our pockets.

New World Yōkai:

• A Phone Weasel
• A Headphone Serpent
• A Pipeline Spector
• A Drone Hawk
• A Blood Sucking Lyme Tic

 

“The new yōkai gaku is a discipline that researches the yōkai that humans imagine (create), that is yōkai as cultural phenomena. Just as with animals, plants and minerals, the form and attributes of yōkai exisitence cannot be studied without considering their relationship with human beings; they always reside within this relation ship with humans, within the world of human imagination. Accordingly, the sudy of yōkai is nothing other that the study of the people who have engendered yōkai. In short, yokaigaku is “yōkai cultural studies [yōkai bunka-gaku]” a “human-ology [ningengaku]” that seeks to comprehend human beings through yōkai. “

Komatsu Kazuhiko

Yōkaigakku Shinko (New Thoughts on Yōkaigaku)

1994

“. . . . Ultimately, the language of of yōkai allows us to talk about the most intimate of beliefs, about fears and desires, and about the mundane and the silly. “

The Book of the Yokai, Michael Dylan Foster,

2015, University of California Press.

Material:

Digital prints on board

Durable wooden figures tucked amongst bushes and peeking out from trees.