This is a beautiful video that shows the artistic process of Riusuke Fukahori, who just showed a selection of amazing multi-dimensional goldfish art at a gallery in London. Apparently he was inspired by his pet goldfish to do both the giant painting drawn finished with a broom and the 3D-looking acrylic on clear resin series.
Artist Yayoi Kusama does it again -- this time with the help of Australian children! As part of her latest exhibition Look Now, See Forever -- on view at the Queensland Art Gallery through March 11 -- she prepared a stark white room and then gave visiting kids thousands of colorful dots that they were then allowed to put wherever they wanted. So cool!
via Spoon and Tamago
Yuko Shimizu is a super-talented illustrator who lives in NYC. Her self-titled monograph came out about a month ago, and is full of provocative surrealistic comic art drawn first with traditional calligraphy brushes, overlaid with digital color and background to look like graphic prints. Super cool. I first met Yuko when I was working on the Studio360 piece about women artists in Japan. She told me that she had always drawn erotic women, but didn't realize she was a feminist until she came to the US for art school and her teachers asked her to analyze her own art for the first time. (The Western tendency to analyze is different from Japan, where it's more common to simply appreciate the aesthetic value of a piece.)
Hitotzuki is a cool husband and wife artist team. The wife, Sasu, explains the process: they both stare at the wall until she starts to feel inspired about where to put her symbol. (The symbol looks like a mandala, but she claims she was not interested in Buddhism and mandalas until she started drawing concentric leaves because she didn't know what else to draw.)
I love what she says about how her husband's waves are the beat, and her symbol is the melody. It's hard to imagine that these two don't get along.
(Thanks, Vincent!)
Ryoji Ikeda has a really amazing exhibit at The Armory on Park Avenue in NYC that closes in a week. It's called The Transfinite, and it's a giant screen that splays out onto the floor in front of it that shows crazy black and white lines and beeps a lot. If you check out the back side, you can understand what it's all about--it's him playing with different combinations of data. Geeky-trippy fun that you can experience in all kinds of ways. Go check it out!
Above, me standing in the middle of the exhibit floor.
More info here.
In 2008, Chronicle published my book: Urawaza: Secret Everyday Tips and Tricks from Japan.
I am also the founder of The Tofu Project, a boutique program that helps Japanese entrepreneurs and creators think deeper, tell better stories, and go out into the world in a much bigger way. We work with companies like Mixi, Japan Airlines, and Salesforce.com.
Sometimes I try to explain Japanese culture on CNN, BBC, CBC, WSJ, ABC (so many acronyms!) or in person at places like the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, ETech, and Ignite!
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