Born in 1902 in Gyeongseong (now Seoul Special City). With an interest in painting since junior high school, he enrolled in the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. In 1927, he moved to France, and through exchanges with Yuzo Saeki and sculptor Ossip Zadkine, with whom he spent time in Paris, he strengthened his creative inclination to capture the skeleton and substance of his subjects, began to explore his own unique form of non-representational expression. He is regarded as a pioneer of abstract painting in Japan. Yamaguchi’s primitive, robust, and dynamic works were highly acclaimed overseas, and he participated in many international exhibitions, including the 3rd Sao Paulo Biennial (1955) and the 28th Venice Biennale (1956).

Yamaguchi’s unique world of abstraction, in which he used only a limited number of colors in strict pursuit of form, became prominent in the 1950s, and Combination of Two (1954) is an early example of his work. In this work, reddish-brown shapes are painted on a black background. The clear-cut forms of these compositions, which were born from the desire to capture the fundamental substance of things, began to be covered entirely in color from the 1960s onwards, with the emphasis being placed on the unevenness and cracks in the surface of the painting.