Critical design in Japan

Material culture, luxury, and the avant-garde

Ory Bartal

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781526139979
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526140012
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Asian Art

This book tells the story of critical avant-garde design in Japan, which emerged during the 1960s and continues to inspire designers today. The practice communicates a form of visual and material protest drawing on the ideologies and critical theories of the 1960s and 1970s, notably feminism, body politics, the politics of identity, and ecological, anti-consumerist and anti-institutional critiques, as well as the concept of otherness. It also presents an encounter between two seemingly contradictory concepts: luxury and the avant-garde. The book challenges the definition of design as the production of unnecessary decorative and conceptual objects, and the characterisation of Japanese design in particular as beautiful, sublime or a product of 'Japanese culture'. In doing so it reveals the ways in which material and visual culture serve to voice protest and formulate a social critique.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Postmodern critiques, Japan’s economic miracle, and the new aesthetic milieu
• 2 The 1968 social uprising and subversive advertising design in Japan: the work of Ishioka Eiko and Suzuki Hachirō
• 3 From cute to Rei Kawakubo: fashion and protest
• 4 Mujirushi Ryohin and the absence of style
• 5 Hironen and the representation of the other
• 6 Digital design as social and critical design in the twenty-first century
• Bibliography
• Index