The Master Printers Series
Manneken Press with John Yau & Richard Hull
In March 2023, poet and art critic John Yau and Chicago-based painter Richard Hull came together at Manneken Press to create a striking series of 23 monotypes titled Wanted!. Longtime friends and seasoned collaborators with others, this marked their first joint artistic endeavor. The project became part of the 2024 exhibition Disguise The Limit: John Yau’s Collaborations, mounted by the University of Kentucky Art Museum.
The concept for Wanted! takes its inspiration from vintage Wild West “wanted” posters. Yau contributed pithy, poetic phrases that served as visual and conceptual prompts. Hull responded with his signature abstracted head-and-shoulder portraits. The resulting works carry both visual and conceptual force. For each print, Yau inscribed phrases in Sharpie on the reverse of rectangular acrylic plates, which he then embellished with color on the printing side. Hull responded with vividly distorted portraiture on a separate, larger square plate. These were printed together in one pass, followed by a second, “ghost” impression using the residual pigment.
Themes in the series range from tributes to overlooked figures in film and art history to humorous wordplay and poignant cultural commentary. Prints such as Wanted: A Lavish Biopic Of Sessue Hayakawa, I and The Lost Movies of Anna May Wong highlight the careers and erasure of early Asian-American film stars, while other works honour under-recognised artists like John D. Graham and Miyoko Ito. The ecstatic I Dreamed Of A Thousand Tongues Wagging And Singing In The Sky/Philip Guston and the punning Giorgio Guston/Philip de Chirico reflect Yau’s deep engagement with modern and contemporary art.that defy convention.” His exceptional brilliance led him to the top of the fashion world in Europe and the United States before his untimely death at the age of thirty-six.
Visually, Hull’s portraits are charged with humour, anxiety, and pathos, echoing what Yau calls “something weirdly funny, slightly disturbing, oddly comical, and a tad creepy.” The expressive synergy between image and text transforms each monotype into a poignant, poetic commentary.
Printed on Arches Cover, Tiepolo, Lana Gravure, and Khadi papers using R&F Pigment Sticks and Caran D’Ache crayons, each print is signed by both artists and embossed with the Manneken Press blind stamp. The series was hand-printed by master printer Jonathan Higgins at Manneken Press, Bloomington, IL.
