Secret Doll Underground: Japanese Surrealist Dolls From The Yaso Collection, Tokyo (Japanese Art Perspectives)
by: Yuichi Konno (Editor)

Softcover. Tokyo, Shinbaku Books, 1st, 2014, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 112 pages, illustrated in color. The modern era of underground doll-making in Japan began in the late 1960s, with the experiments of Simon Yotsuya and Nori Doi. Directly inspired by the Surrealist Doll constructed by Hans Bellmer in 1932, Simon Yotsuya created a series of ball-jointed, life-sized dolls which featured in his ground-breaking "Eve In The Past And The Future" exhibition in Tokyo, in 1973. Simon Yotsuya's work inspired a new wave of avant-garde Japanese doll-making, headed by artists such as Ryo Yoshida and Katan Amano, which has continued to flourish to the present day. SECRET DOLLeEUR^UNDERGROUND, presented by Yuichi Konno, features dolls by fifteen artists, from Simon Yotsuya onwards, with over 80 full-sized colour photographs never before published outside Japan. It also includes Konno's introductory history of the underground doll in Japan.