21_21 DESIGN SIGHT (en)

CURRENT PROGRAM

Exhibition "Material, or "

July 14 (Fri), 2023 - November 5 (Sun), 2023

Most of the objects we encounter in our everyday lives were designed in some way or another. Satoshi Yoshiizumi, the exhibition director, says that the processes by which objects are made include processes by which raw materials become medium for the purpose of creation. What he means is that a raw material, which did not have a particular meaning beforehand, is assigned meaning relating it to an object and becomes a medium through its relationship to people or other living things.
Deploying cultural-anthropological perspectives to tease out how humanity has manipulated nature, we identify how to revive our sensitivity towards raw materials using recent developments in technology and material science. The Exhibition seeks to rediscover and reinterpret the human relationship to raw material. It traces this across the vast and endless story of the Earth. We provide an opportunity for visitors to rethink a world in which life is interwoven with raw material.

Exhibition Director: Satoshi Yoshiizumi (TAKT PROJECT)

UPCOMING PROGRAM

"Modes and Characters: Poetics of Graphic Design"

November 23 (Thu), 2023 - March 10 (Sun), 2024

This exhibition aims at understanding design after the 1990s, when desktop publishing (DTP) became the mainstream in the design world, allowing designers to execute many processes in producing data for publications and printed matters on PCs, by focusing on the relationship between characters and design.
Main exhibits comprise creations by about 50 individuals and teams of graphic designers active in Japan and abroad. In Japanese graphic culture, which has its unique use of Chinese characters and kana, vertical and horizontal writing styles, and a mixture of text and images, how have designers dealt with global digital information technology, what have they produced in this effort, and what possibilities have their activities presented? These questions are tackled in 13 themes, including "formative design," "physicality," and "media."

Exhibition Director: Kiyonori Muroga, Tetsuya Goto, Kensaku Kato