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1 Postmodern critiques, Japan’s economic miracle, and the new aesthetic milieu The social revolution that erupted in 1968 led a number of avant-garde designers and architects working in the early 1970s to take decisions that radically reshaped the course of Japanese design history. Working in Tokyo, the graphic designers Ishioka Eiko and Tanaka Ikkō, the fashion designers Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo, the interior and product designers Kuramata Shirō and Uchida Shigeru, and the architects Andō Tadao and Isozaki Arata, among others, all contributed to the
relocated from the United States to China, Brazil, North Africa, Turkey, and Japan. In this highly competitive market for denim and jeans, Japanese manufacturers have survived against the odds. Anti-establishment street fashion also spread throughout Japan in the 1960s. As the demand for traditional cotton kimonos fell, many manufacturers switched to the production of denim and jeans. In the early 1970s, local manufacturers like Kaihara moved from producing traditional fabrics to making denim. Kaihara was established in 1893 by Sukejiro Kaihara as a weaver of indigo
2 The 1968 social uprising and subversive advertising design in Japan: the work of Ishioka Eiko and Suzuki Hachirō The economic miracle of the 1960s gave a boost to the commercial advertising and graphic design industry, leading to what can be considered the first golden age of graphic design and advertising in postwar Japan.1 At the beginning of the decade, advertisements were heavily influenced by the International Style of the 1950s. However, the atmosphere changed after the 1965 exhibition of Belle Époque posters curated by the collector Katsumie Masaru
This book tells the story of critical avant-garde design in Japan, which emerged during the tumultuous 1960s and continues to inspire contemporary designers today. The postwar avant-garde milieu gave rise to a ground-breaking popular visual language and garnered tremendous attention across the fields of product design, graphic design, fashion design, and architecture. It created conceptually challenging artefacts and made decisions that radically altered the course of Japanese design history. The avant-garde works that were created in the sphere of popular culture communicated a form of visual and material protest inspired by the ideologies and critical theories of the 1960s and 1970s, which were concerned with feminism, body politics, the politics of identity, and, later, ecological, anti-consumerist, and anti-institutional critiques as well as an emphasis on otherness. These designers were driven by passion, anger, and a desire to critique and change society and introduce the avant-garde political thinking of the 1960s and subversive visual and material practices into the heart of consumer culture starting from the 1980s. Their creations thus combined two seemingly contradictory concepts: luxury and the avant-garde. By presenting the new arena of avant-garde Japanese design that is operating as a critical sociopolitical agent and involves an encounter between popular culture, postmodern aesthetics, critical theory, and new economic rules, the book carries the common discourse on Japanese design beyond aesthetic concerns and especially beyond ‘beautiful’ or ‘sublime’, revealing the radical aesthetic of the designed objects that forms an interface leading to critical social protest.
Introduction This chapter examines the ways that two Japanese-style gardens in Portland, Oregon, provide places for learning about aesthetics and between cultures, and for maintaining constructs of cultural identity. It builds on the belief that gardens can function as places of learning (like ‘classrooms’ outside schools), as museum collections and curatorial constructions of culturally significant knowledge, and as artworks. As learning sites, these Portland gardens function as places where visitors can enjoy aesthetically rich somatic experiences while
3 From cute to Rei Kawakubo: fashion and protest The 1968 violent student riots that brought Japan to the verge of a civil revolution would be remembered for bringing to the fore the New Left political movements and philosophical critical thinking advocating human rights, women’s equality, and racial equality. These movements pointed to the prevalent social norms as oppressive. They protested against capitalism and the hierarchical class society it engenders and asked of individuals to assume moral responsibility for their lives and the society in which they
arisen mainly from dissensions within societies that have emerged from what Ronald H. Spector has termed ‘the ruins of empire’:3 British, French, Belgian, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese and latterly Soviet. This chapter explores how four artists in Asia – Yoshiko Shimada from Japan, Sri Lankan artist Jagath Weerasinghe, Indonesian artist FX Harsono, and Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê – have engaged with such issues in their art. The work of these artists follows a long tradition of art about war and conflict over the centuries. One early example among many in Asia can be
5 Hironen and the representation of the other The objects designed in Japan between 1987 and 1995 by the designer duo Ronen Levin and Ōkawa Hiroyuki under the brand name Hironen sometimes look like a surrealist hallucination. Each of the objects is one of a kind, and they are presented in theatrical phantasmagorical scenes replete with all the objects needed for the total design of a space: armchairs, sofas, tables, chests of drawers, lamps, carpets, paintings, decorative artefacts, tableware, and even jewellery. Each of the objects demonstrates radical
4 Mujirushi Ryohin and the absence of style Mujirushi Ryohin is a lifestyle brand entrenched in Japanese consumer culture, which in 2012 was dubbed by the Japanese lifestyle magazine Brutus Casa a ‘lifestyle operating system’.1 However, the company’s first incarnation was as a very modest yet critical food and household product line in Seiyu Stores supermarkets. Wishing to offer consumers inexpensive quality products, the company adopted a new initiative based on the use of waste and untapped raw materials, simplifying the production process, and eliminating the