Photo by Kevin Scanlon ©2008
My good friend Jonathan Wells the founder of RES back in the day has recently been featured in the LA Weekly… His new project is called Flux… Nice one JW!
Designers Note: Meg Wells chose that lime green paint color… it is a no-VOC, environmentally friendly paint from Yolocolorhouse.
The current issue of The New York Times Sunday Magazine has a great profile on artist/product designer/celebrity Takashi Murakami that’s well worth a read. I absolutely love his stuff (and that of his peers, like Yoshitomo Nara). The online version of the piece also includes a slew of photographs of his work and other artists.
One of the interesting things from the article is how integrated art and department stores are. For example, one big seller in Japan is Murakami’s take on a Louis Vuitton bag, and how popular the accompanying exhibition of the bag in the Louis Vuitton store was, with all the trimmings of a gallery opening.
”In Japan, a gallery has no meaning, and a Louis Vuitton shop is a more powerful place to see something.” The Tokyo art critic Noi Sawaragi, who was a crucial early supporter of Murakami and a peer, told me that I was imposing distinctions that no Japanese would make. ”This back and forth doesn’t seem unnatural to us,” he said. ”We have had a long history of museums with department stores as a venue. It was thanks to the Seibu Museum, which no longer exists on the 12th floor of the Seibu department store, that I developed my knowledge of contemporary art… Downstairs you find dresses, bags and shoes, but on the 12th floor you find art.”
And this additional bit:
Indeed, it is one of Murakami’s dearly held tenets that demarcations between fine art and popular merchandise are completely un-Japanese. The Japanese language didn’t even have a word for ”fine art” in 1868, when Japan embraced the West in the Meiji Restoration; only afterward did the country import this foreign ”art” notion and create a vocabulary for it. The blurring of high and low remains characteristic of Japanese society.
Read it Yourself: The Murakami Method, (Free Subscription Required)
After just getting back from Switzerland where she was overseeing the hand manufacturing of a super limited amount of her recent design publication, Intersection: 4 Cities/360 People, Cynthia took some time to forward me the URL to her recently launched personal portfolio site and a more detailed descriptive text on her truely amazing and meticulous typographic specimen of a book…
Her biography follows…
Originally from Houston, Texas, Cynthia Tuan spent her formative years in the eclectic and colorful city of Los Angeles. In 1996, she received her BFA with an emphasis in visual communication from Art Center College of Design. She has an extensive background in editorial, information and interface design for companies such as Banana Republic, Buzz Magazine, Leagas Delaney, Phoenix Pop and Levi’s.
In 2001, her passions for structuring narrative and information led her to the University of Art and Design in Basel, Switzerland where her thesis project, “Intersection: 4 Cities/360 People” was awarded one of the Most Beautiful Swiss Books of 2004.
Now, her journey brings her full circle, back to the States, to work as designer, utilizing her skills and sensitivity to content, collaboration and process. When she’s not working, Cynthia enjoys reading, sport climbing, surfing and knitting.
Here is some more information on Cynthia’s hand crafted design publication…
Intersection: 4 Cities/360 People
The Irish have a saying, “a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet.” However, the reversal is equally valid. A friend can be at times but a stranger who has happened to cross your path.
This fundamental revision of thinking is especially relevant given the global context of the world we now live in. Development of cosmopolitan centers, cheaper transportation, advancements in communication technologies and the breakdown of a singular national identity in favor of more complex and overlapping allegiances, have opened new opportunities to whose paths we intersect. Our relationships are no longer restricted by rigid yet passive constructs such as citizenship, ethnicity or national identity; and therefore evolve according to more flexible and dynamic ways of interaction.
Spanning the period of over four years, Cynthia Tuan meticulously documented her encounters. The collection of encounters is assembled into Intersection: 4 Cities/360 People, a book which explores the dynamics of connections and interactions; black and white statistical data are translated into colorful narrative dialogues reflective of the author’s own multicultural landscape. The goal was not to create information graphics rather to stay true to the content and show how graphics can be transformed and inspired by information.
The secondary and adjoining title: Intersection: 360 People/4 Cities introduces the people and their relationship with the author. Important to also note, the second book acts as a key to the first one.
Designers Notebook: This is the first blog entry of its kind in the Designer Profiles Category. I am planning on posting to this section more over the coming weeks. So keep your eyes peeled for more featured Designers
View: a bridge to… Cynthia Tuan, Design Portfolio
the term ‘oyayubizoku’ literally translated from japanese equates to ‘thumb-gang’ or ‘thumb-tribe’ referring to the masses of young people in japan that use mobile phones for texting, email, and mobile phone conversations.
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