Reviews

Plica Fimbriata #1-3
Review by Jim Poe
June 8, 2022

My old buddy Yoko sent me the first three issues of her zine - such a treat because it was the first non-junk mail I'd gotten besides Christmas cards in like forever. She asked me to write a blurb for the third issue, but honestly I love these so much I'd have done it anyway. They're based on her daily drawing journal, which started four years ago on Instagram, then became a daily comic called Nothing & Everything on Patreon. I've always loved her daily drawings, so I'd seen some of the first two issues already. Faves include drawings of Natasha Lyonne from Russian Doll and Brianna Noble, the Black horsewoman at a BLM protest in Oakland; and her tribute to Integral Yoga Natural Foods, the store in New York where we worked together in the early 2000s. But having them in physical form is extra nice.

I love the way her drawings and lettering are so loose and flowing but also finely detailed. I love how she draws everyday objects like cooking utensils, pens and pencils, even bits of junk found under her bed. I love the visual motif of communicating with loved ones via screens. You can see her growth as an artist over time - these books are one big case for a disciplined drawing practice. The addition of color in the second issue is really striking.

The third issue is so impressive. The effect of reading the patchwork daily journals all together make it like reading an autobiographical graphic novel; and I couldn't put it down. It's a “novel” about day-to-day life at home in the Bay Area during a pandemic. It's intensely personal - often just about her quirky musings or little things she did that day like cook dinner or go skating. She talks about childhood memories, like her mother's hands and her fear of earthworms; or nostalgia for New York in the 90s. It's very much about family, friendship and compassion for others and yourself. But heavier stuff looms over the narrative - the dystopian world we live in, memories of a friend who died recently. There's a running theme about her battle with anxiety and depression, something I can relate to (we both garden to cope with anxiety). Political themes are woven throughout: she confronts the epidemic of racist violence against Asian women and her family's history in the Japanese internment camps. I found that contrast of light and dark so moving. It's like listening to a Sufjan Stevens album, with its shifting focus between the personal and the historical & political. (Yoko is also a musician who's recorded albums, toured, etc., so it's kinda scary how talented she is.)

It's wonderfully human and lovely work. By the way, plica fimbriata are the folds on the bottom of your tongue (I didn’t know that until I read these).

Check her out on IG: @yoko_okay

Reviews by Tony Tone for Boog City
Yoko OK Spins a Community Comics Web
July 31, 2021

Plica Fimbriata #2
38 pages, full color
Textured Elevation #1
44 pages, full color

When something spins really fast, like a tornado, a spiral galaxy, or the carousel in Hitchcock’s Strangers On a Train, stuff is thrown out in all directions—with unpredictable results. It’s the picture you need to keep in your mind when you’re dealing with the remarkable Yoko OK. I first encountered her when she was still a college student, visiting her hometown of New York City, and playing a set at the late, lamented Sidewalk Cafe. At that time she performed accompanied only by her own guitar, and even though both the singing and the guitar playing were pretty amateurish (I guess “serviceable” is a word I would use) the quality of the songs, and the confidence she projected in presenting them, made me sit straight up in my chair. 

And now many, many years down the line, Yoko is still spinning and things are still being thrown from the vortex that are remarkable in one way or another—and sometimes in many different ways. In the time since, she has fronted several really great bands, including the wonderful Dream Bitches, who made two albums, created photographs (her years-long series of pictures of people caught in mid-air while jumping is especially fascinating), and produced lots and lots of drawings.

So let’s talk about the drawings, ’cause that’s what we’re here for. Yoko’s hand-drawn art seemed to take more of a center stage after she moved to the Bay Area about 10 years ago (important to note: she is still doing all of those other things, like music and photography and roller skating and encouraging and organizing other people to do all those things as well, but I’m only going to concentrate on one of them for the purposes of this piece). Visual art had always been part of her life—her mom is an artist, and was also a part of the core creative staff for an iconic N.Y. clothing firm—but she had laid aside drawing to some degree to pursue other forms. 

Then in 2018 she started “Daily Drawings,” which she began posting on Instagram. Also during this time her drawing style coalesced into what it is now—economical sketched shapes and details, usually (although not always) vibrantly colored with markers, which make each panel come “alive” without necessarily making them more “realistic.” Every person and object is caricatured, but at the same time Yoko’s obsession with small details also enters the fray, and so you are looking at things that are not drawn as “accurate” depictions of the way things look, but are accurate depictions of how they exist in the world. 

Although her detailed sharing of so many parts of her life—snippets of conversations with her therapist, or things like ‘Four Things I Did (in the last 24 hours)’—is very much the zeitgeist of comics, books, and social media nowadays, she is not presenting these things to show what an interesting person she is, or to shine a spotlight on herself, but to show how interesting and important even the most mundane aspects of the world are.

A great example is “Stuff that had fallen between the bed and the wall from June or July 2019 through now (retrieved April 4th 2020 at approximately 2:35 PM)” from her comic Plica Fimbriata #2. The title alone is a pretty good encapsulation of how Yoko works, but the drawings even more so—the “piece of a cardboard box” she digs out is rendered with the scrap of its address clearly legible, the illustration of “this many pens!” shows seven pens and two crayons with enough detail so you can recognize the brands, and the “two quarter-sized flyers for the same show” actually show enough detail of the text that you could actually attend the show (if it wasn’t more than a year in the past). Even the title of the book itself, Plica Fimbriata, is the medical name for the small folds in the membrane on the underside of your tongue, a tiny detail of the physical world that most people don’t even think about but Yoko got interested in at one point. 

But the real magic is in rendering all this mundane detail somehow meaningful. That’s more difficult to parse out. I won’t say I totally understand how she gets this effect, but one of the aspects is that although her detailed sharing of so many parts of her life—snippets of conversations with her therapist, or things like “Four Things I Did (in the last 24 hours)”—is very much the zeitgeist of comics, books, and social media nowadays, she is not presenting these things to show what an interesting person she is, or to shine a spotlight on herself, but to show how interesting and important even the most mundane aspects of the world are. This is autobiographical art that is not “introspective” in the way that so much art is nowadays. She is always looking out and around, even as she places it very much in the context of her own personal experience. And her own enthusiasm, sense of wonder, and fascination with how the world works illuminates this material in a way that’s unique. And it’s the physical world that Yoko wants to examine, not the internal one.

Which brings us to Textured Elevation, really one of the best art zines I’ve ever seen. This zine is compiled, rather than wholly created, by Yoko but her personality and personal obsessions form the structure that gives it life. Much of Yoko’s work examines the relationship of physical space with details of the internal life of not just her, but people. In this collection of “maps” (real and imagined) made by various artists, writers, musicians, and other people she knows, these things are placed on top of (or within) physical spaces. There are plenty of minute details carefully cataloged (a Yoko OK specialty that bleeds into other people’s work here) and sometimes a touch of nostalgia (another obsession of hers is cataloging past dates, and numbers, and anniversaries, often at length) and others follow her lead her as well. 

A great example is the writer Kate Wheeler’s touching and wistful “Walking Meditation” which Wheeler introduces with “I’ve spent so much time this year remembering—it seemed like every nice thing that would happen was in the past” and includes her walk to her elementary school, and among others, two walks in Brooklyn with the late musician and anti-folk provocateur Dashan Coram, and a third walk that is labeled, “Walk the day that Dashan died. We didn’t know it yet. It was raining and we stopped to get borscht on the way.” Or the artist Anna Moriarty Lev’s “A Map of My Body Where so Many Things Have Happened” which is just what the title says, and so much more. It includes notations like, “uterus has grown/ two babies and pushed/ them out/ stretched and bled/ swelled with preeclampsia/ rages with hormones.”  

This is the wide world as humans perceive it, living in their heads and living on the Earth—and with each other—at the same time. It seems fitting that it would be created and published after more than a year of not-quite-over pandemic, where questions about how we live and how we used to live—and with who—are more on our minds than ever. And of course—typical Yoko!—there is an accompanying Soundcloud playlist, which includes the song that gives the zine its name, a collaboration between the folk/antifolk guitar virtuoso Dibs and Yoko. Her own contribution is a profusely illustrated version of the song’s lyrics that forms the centerfold of the zine.

I could probably do a little essay on each contribution, but instead I think people should read it and write their own. Really great artists often not only make great work but create communities of people trying to do great work. That’s been my nearly 20-year experience with Yoko OK, and it looks like there’s no sign of it changing anytime soon.