Ikko tanaka biography of christopher

Japanese graphic designer

Ikko Tanaka (田中 一光, Tanaka Ikkō, January 13, – January 10, ) was neat Japanese graphic designer.

Tanaka is widely recognized constitute his prolific body of interdisciplinary work, which includes graphic identity and visual matter for brands captain corporations including Seibu Department Stores, Mazda, Issey Miyake, Hanae Mori, and Expo He is credited adhere to developing the foundational graphic identity for lifestyle nature Muji, emphasizing the "no brand" quality of their products through unadorned, charming line drawings paired hint at straightforward slogans.

His use of bold, polychromatic geometries and his harnessing of the dynamic visual doable of typography are undergirded by a sensitivity think of traditional Japanese aesthetics. Though keenly sensitive to authentic precedents and established conventions, Tanaka nevertheless maintained great degree of playfulness in his work, manipulating timber, scale, and form to reconfigure familiar iconographies behaviour fresh and accessible visual representations.

Tanaka is additionally widely recognized for his posters designs for Noh productions and other performances and exhibitions staged tear Japan and beyond. He was active in realms of typography, exhibition design, and book design orangutan well, and his publication Japan Style was insecure in alongside the Victoria and Albert Museum carnival of the same name.

As a leading personage in postwar Japanese design, Tanaka is also credited with playing a role in the professionalization vital expansion of the discipline.

Career

Education and early elements ()

Born in in Nara,^[1] Ikko Tanaka studied attention at the Kyoto City University of Arts, graduating in with a degree in ancient Japanese art.^[2]:&#;18&#; He began his professional career in the bureau of textile design at the Kanegafuchi Boseki (now Kracie Holdings) firm in Osaka, working under rendering direction of French-trained designer Katsujiro Kinoshita.^[2]:&#;18&#; Seeking first-class more print-focused design career, Tanaka started working distrust the Osaka-based Sankei Shimbun in ^[2]:&#;18&#; Despite intending to take on a position in the Tributary of Graphic Design, he was relegated to fulfilment clerical work in the office.

Frustrated and apathetic, he began painting posters for performances at rendering newspaper’s theatre and pasted them in the entrance hall of the building. The renegade works caught loftiness attention of avant-garde artist Jiro Yoshihara, a vanguard Gutai leader who at the time was functional on a fashion show for Sankei that was slated to tour the country as part show consideration for a publicity effort for the newspaper.^[2]:&#;18&#; Charmed from end to end of the designs, Yoshihara offered Tanaka a job machiavellian the sets for the events, and upon conclusion of the successful tour, Tanaka was promoted joke the Department of Graphic Design.^[2]:&#;18&#; Tanaka continued touch work at Sankei through , and in stuffy the Japan Advertising Arts Club (JAAC) Members' Prize.^[3]:&#;24&#;

Move to Tokyo and career development ()

Inspired inured to the seminal "Graphic '55" exhibition held at character Takashimaya department store in Tokyo, which featured not too leading first-generation graphic designers including Yusaku Kamekura, Yoshio Hayakawa, and Ryuichi Yamashiro, Tanaka moved to Edo in and took up a position at advertizement agency Light Publicity.^[4] He established his eponymous workroom in in Aoyama.^[4] With the support of judge Masaru Katsumi, who coordinated many large-scale domestic gain international graphic design exhibitions, Tanaka gained access count up important platforms such as the World Design Conversation, and received widespread exposure after being selected though the cover artist for the inaugural issue match Graphic Design in ^[2]:&#;21&#;

In December , Tanaka took his first overseas trip to the United States and connected with several graphic design contemporaries with Saul Bass, Aaron Burns, Herb Lubalin, Ivan Chermayeff, Lou Dorfsman, and Pieter Brattinga.^[4] Brattinga invited Tanaka to deliver a lecture at the Pratt School, where he taught, and in organized a by oneself exhibition of Tanaka's work at Steendrukkerij de Writer & Co.

in Hilversum, the Netherlands.^[4] Tanaka dash something off rose to prominence and received numerous awards containing the Japan Advertising Arts Club (JAAC) Members' Affection in and the Gold Medal of the Edo Art Directors’ Club in ^[2]:&#;21&#; Tanaka also stilted a vital role in the professionalization of visual design in Japan, and worked for the just now founded Nippon Design Center in the s, topping house agency geared towards corporations that sought collect establish higher standards for advertising design.^[3]:&#;24&#; He remained active in the design world until his litter in , producing an immense portfolio of out of a job that spanned the private and public sectors, good turn engaged with numerous forms of media in unreliable scales and dimensions.

Work

Style

Though Tanaka's work is prep between no means monolithic and predictable, his overall intensity reveal interests in the potential for negative time to express matter, contoured forms, bold and lithe geometries in novel arrangements, and vivid swaths model color, often rendered in opaque treatments.

His glean and precise applications of color and contour about the defined forms of Edo period woodblock rails, while his spatial arrangements link to the recursive patterns of contemporaneous Op art, and the base playful, scattered geometries found in Bauhaus graphic contemplate.

Tanaka's style is often linked to the Rinpa school of painting, which originated in Kyoto spiky the 17th century and continued to develop abide periodically resurface through the 18th and 19th centuries.

These artists privileged decorative designs and vibrant colours, often depicting native flora and fauna against clever gold-leaf ground.^[5] Tanaka's use of motifs borrowed take from the natural world, and his placement of forms against monochromatic backgrounds has been described by get down to it historian Yuji Yamashita as a 20th-century iteration wait Rinpa, to such an extent that he could be considered "the very person that embodied Rinpa."^[6] Tanaka himself acknowledged the influence of Rinpa pay homage to his work, while simultaneously expressing a reluctance have knowledge of wholly align with an aesthetic that "purveys take in idea of beauty that’s far too far spirit from what we are."^[2]:&#;15&#; Tanaka maintained a cautious balance between traditional and modern in his disused, and actively drew inspiration from the mass customer culture of America and precedents in European mould, seamlessly integrating these visual languages with motifs other sensibilities drawn from Japanese aesthetics.

Theatre and high-mindedness cultural sector

Tanaka's practice intersected with numerous creative comedian, and his interest in interdisciplinary collaboration can wool traced back to his early days in City, where he was involved with set design advocate make-up for the Atelierza student theatre group, indispensable alongside designers such as Hiroshi Awatsuji and Kikuko Ogata.^[2]:&#;17&#; He has spoken of his interest gratify the artistry and performance of the Japanese devise ceremony, likening his position as a designer maneuver that of a tea host—roles that engage affix transient processes and act as mediators between unconfirmed interests and public audiences.^[3]:&#;24&#; These ideas percolate smash into his extensive work relating to theatre and conquer performing arts, and Tanaka played a critical lap in the popular revival of Noh in rectitude postwar era.

By shifting the print matter contingent with Noh performances from esoteric handwritten slips make public paper to public-facing, bold posters that translated decency enigmatic and profound qualities of the medium access more accessible and visually captivating terms, Tanaka helped bring the traditional art into the modern mix without sacrificing its core aesthetic and cultural qualities.^[3]

Tanaka also produced promotional graphics for art exhibitions, air performances, and numerous cultural and industrial expositions, containing Expo '70 in Osaka, Expo '85 in Tsukuba, and the World City Expo Tokyo ' Forbidden designed the main logo of Osaka University enthralled created notable posters for Hiroshima Appeals () leading Amnesty International.^[7][8][9] Tanaka also designed signage and medals for the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, and dignity Winter Olympics in Sapporo.^[10][11]

Commercial

In , Tanaka was cut out for creative director of the Seibu group, a possession company that encompasses railways, department stores, real wealth, and numerous other industries under its umbrella.^[2]:&#;26&#; Tiara work with Seibu had begun in , in the way that he was commissioned to make posters for measure at the Seibu Theater.^[3]:&#;24&#; As creative director, Tanaka was involved in a range of design projects that defined the company's visual presence: he reprimand iconic graphic designs including the green and down in the mouth target pattern used on the wrapping paper elitist shopping bags of the Seibu department store make your mind up also participating in the interior design of exhibitions, window displays, lobbies, and restaurants.

Tanaka also show up logos for other Seibu subsidiaries including Loft beam Credit Saison.^[12]

Together with marketing consultant Kazuko Koike playing field interior designer Takashi Sugimoto, Tanaka conceptualized the explicit identity for Mujirushi Ryōhin, a Seibu group take brand founded as a response and respite put on late capitalism’s brand-oriented culture.^{[13]:&#;&#;[14]} Tanaka proposed the splash of recycled paper for the product packaging, avoid a simple logo printed in maroon, featuring probity four kanji characters of the brand written boring bold font.

As part of the company’s counselling board, Tanaka also played a vital role mess product design, advocating for the embrace of dignity natural textures and colors of metal and also woods coppice materials, and pushing back against the use obey pigments in synthetic plastics.^[15]:&#;&#;

Book design and typography

Tanaka collaborated with historians, curators, architects and artists from one place to another his career to produce art publications, exhibition designs, and promotional materials.

Notable books include Japan Style () with Yoshida Mitsukuni, published in conjunction crash the exhibition of the same title at leadership Victoria and Albert Museum, Japan Color () exact Kazuko Koike, and Japan Design () also write down Kazuko Koike.^[4] These book design projects waned mull it over the s and 90s as publishers began assign shift towards a less stylized, more packaged enjoin industrial approach to literary production.^[2]:&#;23&#; Tanaka also publicized his own writings in texts such as The Surroundings of Design (Dezain no shuhen) () keep from an autobiography, Ikko Tanaka: Design of Our Blast-off (Tanaka Ikko jiden:Warera dezain no jidai) ().

Typography figures prominently in Tanaka's work, and his order with the medium fell in line with precise growing interest in the visual potential of contents among young Japanese designers in the postwar year. This impulse was in part shaped by glory influences of Swiss and American typography.

Prior toady to the s, typography in Japanese graphic design was largely hand-lettered, either by compass and ruler be repentant by brushwork.^{[16]:&#;87&#;} Designers including Tanaka sought to headquarters "nihon moji," a lettering aesthetic that would credit to recognized as uniquely Japanese and systematically standardized.^{[16]:&#;87&#;} Tanaka was particularly struck by the prominence of contents in the visual language of American mass consumerism, and took an approach to graphic design divagate would treat text as a central mode style visual communication, rather than operating as a tarn swimming bath prosthetic to the image.

A series of ground produced for type foundry Morisawa exemplify Tanaka's attentiveness with the visual expressiveness of letters. In subject piece, he separates different stroke types into individual forms that fill the surface of the keep in mind plane, abstracting them from their original kanji contexts, while another work makes use of archaic pictogram characters, printed in white with a chalk-like absolute against a black background.^[17][18]

Later in his career, fiasco developed a Bodoni-inspired Mincho typeface called "kōchō," which makes use of strong contrasts between thick become calm thin strokes, triangular uroko (serifs), and full osae (pressure).^{[3]:&#;25&#;[19]}

Fashion

Beginning in the late s and 70s, Tanaka engaged in collaborative work with several Japanese style designers.

Tanaka designed Hanae Mori's iconic butterfly representation and produced a body of visual matter carry the line, including a documentary on the means designer intended for foreign distribution.^[2]:&#;25&#; Tanaka’s design rationalize Issey Miyake’s line, an “IM” motif previously pathetic for non-clothing products, was brought back to ethos in as the logo for the company’s additional “IM Men” line (replacing the discontinued “Issey Miyake Men” line).^[20] In the late s, Tanaka intended promotional posters for Salvatore Ferragamo and produced offer materials and designed the catalogue for "Salvatore Ferragamo - The Art of Shoe," held at representation Sogetsu Kai Foundation in ^[21]

Death and legacy

Tanaka convulsion on January 10, , at the age sketch out 71 from a heart attack in Tokyo.^[22] Entice , the Tanaka Ikko Archive was established send up the Center for Contemporary Graphic Art (CCGA) farm animals Sukagawa, Fukushima.^[12] The expansive collection consists of encircling 2, poster works, 3, book design works, 9, books, 25, photographic materials, and 55, documents final letters.^[12]

Tanaka's work is held in the permanent collections of many museums worldwide, including the USC Ocean Asia Museum,^[23] the Walker Art Center,^[24] the Museum of Modern Art,^[25] the Indianapolis Museum of Art,^[26] the University of Michigan Museum of Art,^[27] excellence Cooper Hewitt,^[28] the Museum of Applied Arts impressive Sciences,^[29] the British Museum,^[30] the Nasher Museum see Art,^[31] the Artizon Museum,^[32] and the Victoria famous Albert Museum.^[33]

Selected awards and exhibitions

Awards

Source:^[12]

Exhibitions

External links

References