Interesting.
Thinking back over your pieces in this light, all of them would seem to make
for some extremely unique 3D pieces.
Most people who work mainly in three dimensions like architects or
product designers approach their projects from that angle all the beginning of
the planning stage. However, graphic design allows for greater freedom on
planes or drawings. When people hear that I’m going
to be working with an architectural firm, they usually imagine that’ll be doing their website, logo, business cards, or something like
that, but they’re thinking about it the wrong way. Just
as there are some folks out there who can see the pieces
I have up on Instagram and visualize them in 3D, graphics can have infinite potential if one just allows even small ideas
to grow. That’s why I feel it’s
maybe best to not limit yourself to a single industry or category.
Have
you always thought of things in two dimensions?
Yeah. But as the plans for the Senrokuya logo demonstrate, these kinds
of designs are made in pretty much the same way as mechanical schematics and
also an example of carrying over drawings into a logo. Then I have to consider
the best method for producing the final output. What I’m trying to say is, it’s less like making a
logo than it is like making an object, installation, or product. Conversely,
most of the pieces I currently have on display at +81 Gallery Kyoto are prints,
but here I’m viewing them as plots and making them with
that in mind.
Do you
usually start thinking of the method you will use to plot something out when
you have an exhibition coming up?
If I start to wonder about how to plot out a piece, I take a moment to
research techniques and actually even go check things out firsthand. Like I was
saying about music earlier, you can’t be in
tune for the show if you don’t know the venue and its
acoustics. Another thing is that if the content of the piece and the method
used to plot it out don’t go together well then I feel
like the viewers aren’t going to get the right feeling
from it. I find delving into this kind of stuff to be really interesting.
You mentioned an exhibition at the +81 Gallery Kyoto. This is
the first one you’ve done in a while.
The last show I did in New York was five or six years ago, and the last
one I did in Japan was in Shizuoka in 2012. That’s
why this latest exhibition felt almost like rehab for me in a way. That said, I
kept myself busy with NEWLINE during the interim, and also accumulated a
decent amount of ideas and creations. Most of these are still in the very early
draft stages, so I’m going to adding things and making
adjustments to get them in an outputable form so that I can hopefully make
another proper release of work this year.
Are you showing any new pieces at your +81 Gallery exhibition?
I have things there that are slight evolutions of some of those new,
early-stage ideas I just mentioned. To put it more precisely, there are several
pieces included that are part of a series I’ve been
working on these past four years that expands upon NEWLINE, that I think at
this point may as well be part of NEWLINE 3. There are also a few
nascent ideas from the Black series that I touched on earlier, along
with some things from an experiment in visual correspondence I did with a
certain photographer. All the stuff I’m showing from
those I printed out at a convenience store.