A Japanese Compendium

Keeping up with the ongoing Japanese design theme, I wanted to find a way to make different things collide, much like with past articles featuring art vs fashion or uncanny mixes. In this compendium, pleated textiles meet distorted ceramics, hand-painted spoon holders pair up with hand-dyed silk dresses, and tea cups prove to be as elegant as striped shirts.

Tadanori Yokoo

The Longest Necklace, 1965

Tadanori Yokoo ( 横尾　忠則 ) is the king of japanese graphic design and illustration. Famous since the 60s, his reign is undisputed and his influence global. His tentacular body of work takes root in japanese ukiyo-e and european Art history, from Andy Warhol to Russian Constructivism, Magritte to Hokusai.

Yutaka Satoh

Japanese artists are the masters of absurdism. From Toshio Saeki to Takeshi Kitano, from painting to cinema, works of art often play with the limits of sense and reality. The same freedom can be found in design: graphic designer Yutaka Satoh's work is a good example of that.

Laurent Kronental

The discovery of Laurent Kronental's photographic series "Souvenir d'un Futur" (Memories of a Future) left me speechless. I have no knowledge in architecture, merely an avid curiosity: I knew that there were some "retro-futuristic" buildings in France among the "grands ensembles" (suburban complexes) built during the 20th century, but I didn't expect to discover such surreal buildings.

Helmut Smits

The least that can be said about dutch artist Helmut Smits is that he is extremely resourceful, and doesn't lack a sense of humor. I discovered his work with his wax sculptures project, in which he combined different type of candles to create weird and colorful shapes. The rest of his production is extremely diverse and reminds me of the amazing Rafael Rozendaal in some ways: take a simple idea, make it happen, repeat it several times, see where it goes. It feels like Helmut Smits doesn't discard a lot of ideas, and experiments tirelessly with the same mechanisms — humor, simplicity, wit, and a touch of poetry. The results are often surprising, always clever. David Shrigley might be one of his cousins.