Really enjoying the original style of illustrator Kiyomi Saitou.
Showing posts with label Japanese Artists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Japanese Artists. Show all posts
Toshiyuki Fukuda
I stumbled upon the wonderful online portfolio of Japanese artist Toshiyuki Fukuda. Fantastic illustrations and handmade plush.
Inohaco
I was browsing the preview images from the upcoming Sweet Streets exhibition, and I stumbled upon a piece I really liked from the Japanese artist Inohaco. After searching for the website, I found an amazing portfolio filled with girls and neon dinosaurs. I think I'm in love.
Shin Tanaka + Scion + Giant Robot
Scion has been working hard to promote new and upcoming artists, and they've just teamed with Giant Robot and the Japanese artist Shin Tanaka to create this do-it-yourself paper toy. The toy will appear in 3 segments, each in a different issue of Giant Robot magazine. You can make a complete figure from each issue or collect them all and assemble them into the larger figure shown above.
Check out more about Shin Tanaka on his website, where you can also download lots more paper toy templates, or read his interview in Giant Robot issue #56.
Chinatsu Ban : "Eating an Elephant One Mouthful at a Time"
I'm sorry for the lack of posting. I moved this weekend! I'm back to work now, and my first post for the week is about my favorite artist, Chinatsu Ban!
Chinatsu Ban has a solo show at the Parco Factory in Tokyo until February 9th. The show is entitled "Eating an Elephant One Mouthful at a Time"
There's not a ton of images from the show that I can find online (which, annoyingly, always seems to be the case with any of her exhibits). The work has changed a lot from her early days, and I wish I could see larger pictures of it.
While researching this show, I was able to find Chinatsu Ban's personal blog, which is filled with beautiful pieces that I haven't seen before. It's in Japanese, and Google Translate definitely isn't doing a very good job translating it for me so I can't decipher much. I'm content to click through the images :)
Here's the press release from KaiKai Kiki about Chinatsu Ban's latest show:
Adorable elephants dressed curiously in underpants. Butterflies, birds, girls and enigmatic twins. Anthropomorphic apples and ice cream cones … In her vivid paintings and drawings, Chinatsu Ban presents us with a multicolored world where the beloved motifs of children and young girls are transformed into mystical characters.
Cute but slightly unnerving, these unique creatures fuse organically with delicately rendered color surfaces, increasing in number like dividing cells. Always at play, they change shape freely, mutating into plant life and other forms.
The most prominent of these recurring characters is the elephant, a presence that, to Ban, brings with it a sense of peace, like a guardian angel. On the other hand are darker elements, like twins and monsters, beings which convey a sense of anxiety. Though her work seems at first glance to possess a fairy tale like quality, beneath the surface of Ban’s pictures is an ever present dread, born from her understanding of the mortality of living things.
The recent birth of Ban’s child, an event which allowed her to experience first-hand the stirrings of new life, has also brought about a change in her work. More decorative, more refined, her new compositions contain scenes of child-birth and the forms of parent and child, among their many images. Within them is the emergence of a world-view that can only be described as a celebration of the cycles of life. Clearly for Ban, there is an effortless link between the creative process and the day to day.
Born in Aichi Prefecture, 1973.
After participating in a series of group exhibitions that began with 2001’s "Yokai Festival" (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo), Ban held a solo show at the Tomio Koyama Gallery and the Marianne Boesky Gallery in NY. Her giant parent-and-child elephant sculptures, exhibited in New York’s Central park in 2005, were the subject of much discussion. With this solo exhibition, comprised of paintings and drawings that include 6 new large scale works, we hope you get a chance to experience the warm embrace of Chinatsu Ban’s world.
Yoshitomo Nara @ Blum & Poe!!
I played hookey today and headed over to Blum & Poe to see the Yoshitomo Nara show. I forgot my camera, but I had my iphone! See all the photos I took on my Flickr page, or check out my favorites after the jump.
This is the second Nara show I have seen in person. The first was a few years ago in San Jose. I have been a Yoshitomo Nara fan for a long time, and his work always astounds me in person. First of all- it's HUGE. Three of the paintings in this show were wall sized. Secondly, his work always appears childlike on the surface, but when you are seeing it in person, it takes on such a different feeling. Many of the pieces are on rough, nailed together pieces of wood, or are showcased in old scratched frames. The girls often are beat up, bleeding, or maimed in some way. Not to mention that the paintings usually always have some form of profanity scrawled next to the characters in Nara's signature penmanship.
In this show in particular, Nara built a wagon and filled it with what I assume to be are trinkets and items of inspiration from his studio. It really did feel like a studio- even though it was such a small space. The fact that it was in a wagon made you feel like the art was heading in a new direction, like it was waiting for new events to unfold on it's path. It was a truly wonderful installation- complete with a loop of the Vandals song "My Girlfriends Dead." Aside from the toys and sketches, it was filled with coffee cups, ramen packets and empty beer bottles. I'd guess those are also items that are prevelant in Nara's Tokyo studio.
Nara was born in Japan but he studied in Germany and many of the pieces have German writing on them. I wish I knew German so I could read what they say.
There was a wall with 6 pretty detailed sketches of girls. I haven't seen such detailed sketches by Nara before- the ones in this show were really quite intricate up close. I tried to take some close ups so you could see all the fine lines and shading.
His plexi-glass peace symbol was filled with the most amazing handmade toys. I wanted them all! I wish I could take them out and see each one- but I guess it's part of the allure that they so crowded that they are nearly undecipherable as individual items.
The show is at Blum & Poe till the end of the month- check it out if you are in Los Angeles!
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