A Visual Feast of Japanese Art

There were a few exhibitions happening at the National Art Gallery in conjunction with KLDW2010, and we are pleased to show some snippets from the Japan Young Illustrators Exhibition and Tokyo Visualist, curated by Satoru Yamashita of +81.

Aiyoh! Sashimi!

There were plenty of illustrations up at the exhibition, but of varying degrees of skill and styles. From a once-over, it seems fashion and children illustration are the most prevalent, with plenty of styles reminiscent of such greats as Tadahiro Uesugi and Stina Persson. The influence of manga was also strong.

Exhibition View

As for Tokyo Visualist, it was a serving of more mature and established art from the like of Graphic Design star Hideki Inaba and award-winning Hideki Nakajima. I was deeply dissapointed there turned out to be none of Kohei Nawa's amazing glass sculptures. Unless they put it in some corner, which is unlikely because, come on its KOHEI NAWA!

The attention-grabbing photography of Mika Ninagawa.

It isn't too weird when you consider its by a Japanese.

In the same hall were selections from winning works of the Japan Media Arts Festival. Of note is the fascinating Urban font that was created from tracking the artist as he cycles purposely around the streets of Japan in the shape of respective alphabets. Sound and image recordings of his journey can be seen as you trace the countours of the alphabet, allowing a glimpse into Japanese everyday urban life.

In retrospect, this is probably the only time the National Art Gallery will ever have Japanese comics in its hallowed halls.

The exhibitions are on until 16 May. Hope you guys are lucky enough to catch it.

the Business of Design

Fredrik channeling The Hulk

To quote Fredrik Haren: 'There's nothing worse than talking to a bunch of designers at 10 in the morning.'

In light of that truth, we have to salute him for being the very first speaker of the Business of Design Forum held on 1 May at the National Art Gallery Auditorium, in conjunction with KLDW2010. Early though it was, Fredrik held his own with an informative and no-holds-barred talk to educate the dazed audience about what makes a good design brilliant (an excellent marketing strategy) and why us young Asian designers have a good advantage over our Western pals (hint: we got the best of both worlds and they don't know sh*t about us). Fredrik is the creator of the bestselling The Idea Book.
The images in this post will be biased to DevilRobots, a 5-man design team responsible for the popular character To-Fu Oyako. "Cute and Evil" summarises their aesthetics and we couldn't agree more. With designs such as these, how could their products not be flying off shelves?

Only the Japanese can make To-Fu so darn adorable.

DevilRobots has this redesign service where they reinterpret existing characters into 'Devi' style.
Look at what they did to Japanese anime classic GeGeGe no Kitaro:

If you think this is awesome, check out DeviReborn.

Here's 2/5 of DevilRobots. I wouldn't say their talk is focused on the theme, as they were introducing their company and works, but not so much on the business side of things.

You'd expect them to come dressed in hip-hop wear.

On the other hand, Akinori Kojima from Asterisk Agency should've done the opposite. His presentation didn't feel very complete as he did not show much of his company portfolio. Considering they represent plenty of leading Japanese illustrators, it would've been a good accompaniment to his talk.

This is Nancy Chen of [ESP], a boutique web ad agency in Taipei. She regaled us with tales of her experience of running a creative business in Taipei, causing many fellow entrepreneurs to nod in agreement. (It seems client mentality is the same the world over.) Nancy gave plenty of useful tips to increase the efficiency of workflow in a business, as well as sound advice about how to start up a business. It's not exactly 'the business of design' per se, but nevertheless a good lesson for students aspiring to work independantly.

Kudos to organisers KLDW for arranging this forum! For the full coverage, catch issue8.