Word: ishioka
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Graphic and Stage Set Designer Eiko Ishioka, who has also worked in the U.S., is just as sanguine about the creative boom: "Japanese design is more flourishing and diverse than ever before." At no time in the roughly 130 years that Japan has traded with the West have its applied arts been so influential abroad. "I've lived with Asian influence all my life," says Eugene Kupper, an architect and UCLA professor, but "today Japan is in the forefront. It's the most exciting it has ever been." While tradition clearly informs some of the best new Japanese design...
Outside of architecture, the issue of tradition is not so pressing. Indeed, designers of graphics and interiors are more unselfconsciously ahistorical, often out-Westernizing the West in seeking novelty for its own sake. "If we steeped ourselves in tradition, we would not be able to create anything," says Eiko Ishioka...
...Designer Ishioka takes no pleasure in being noted as the first woman to have achieved all she has achieved. Says she: "I hated it, and I still hate it." She is not only a woman in a man's world, she is an assertive feminist to boot. Her advertising posters and TV ads for a chain of clothing shops feature an undressed woman and the aggressively quixotic slogan: DON'T STARE AT THE NUDE; BE NAKED...
...Ishioka's East-West ambivalence is palpable. Although she decamped to work in New York City in 1980 (and "did nothing," she says), Ishioka returned to Tokyo after two years; then her interest shifted to U.S. and European projects. There was the Mishima movie and a Miles Davis album cover, and now she is at work on sets for M. Butterfly, a Broadway play, and for a Philip Glass opera to be produced in New York. "In the '80s," she says, "I would like to cause a commotion outside Japan...
...sometimes to just go rest and not get ideas," he says stoutly, but, Ishioka insists, "he cannot stay in one place for more than three days." Figuratively, at least, that is just as well. In May he lived out a long-cherished goal and traveled the southwestern United States by car, and he is now dreaming of further voyages. To Buenos Aires in November; to Tahiti for the new year. "Make me a plan for my trip," he will ask friends who have covered the same territory. "I'll go anywhere," he adds, although there is no mistaking that. "Where...