John Yau is an art critic and poet. Richard Hull is a Chicago-based painter influenced by the Chicago Imagists who were his teachers and mentors. In March 2023 the pair spent several days at Manneken Press working together on a series of monotypes.

Yau and Hull are longtime friends and have both engaged in collaborations with others but never with each other. For their collaboration they chose to work loosely within the format of "wanted' posters from the old Wild West. Yau provided pithy phrases which he sketched in colors on rectangular plates. Hull used the texts as prompts, drafting abstracted portraits on a larger square plate. The three plates were placed together and printed once for the initial impression, then a second cognate or “ghost” impression was pulled, a pattern followed throughout the series.

Each of the prints contains a message. Some call for more attention to under-recognized artists like John D. Graham, and Miyoko Ito. “Wanted: The Lost Movies of Anna May Wong” (2023) is a lamentation for the first Chinese-American film star whose career was diminished due to stereotyping and Hays Code censorship.

“Wanted: A Lavish Biopic Of Sessue Hayakawa, I” (2023) forefronts another early 20th-century Hollywood film actor whose career as a romantic lead was arrested by wartime anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States. Hayakawa’s career rebounded post-WWII with the support of fellow actors, and later appeared in Bridge On the River Kwai, Swiss Family Robinson, and others, but remains relatively unknown to contemporary audiences. Yau’s text calls attention to Hayakawa’s name and talent while Hull’s image of a fractured yet radiant figure is suggestive of the racism that withered the actor’s legacy.

“Giorgio Guston/Philip de Chirico” is paean to favorite artists, and jocose wordplay appears in “Wanted: Juan Ted”. Hull’s abstract heads are intended to evoke humor, anxiety, exasperation, or pathos and become a visual phraseology to Yau’s writing; or, as Yau states, “Something weirdly funny, slightly disturbing, oddly comical, and a tad creepy.”

The exhibition "Disguise The Limit: John Yau’s Collaborations” was mounted by the University of Kentucky Art Museum in early 2024 and included several of the monotypes from this session. The “Wanted!” prints are approximately 30 x 22 inches. Twenty-three unique impressions were pulled by hand using archival oil and water-based materials, and are signed by both artists. The prints are published by and available from Manneken Press.