Word: machida
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...late 1990s, Sharp's president, Katsuhiko Machida, was determined to shed the company's image as a mere parts provider, so he approached industrial designer Toshiyuki Kita for help. "Our goal was to create not just a flat TV but a completely new product," says Masatsugu Teragawa, Sharp's corporate audiovisual director. "It had to look nothing like what we know TV to look like...
...rare move for a Japanese manufacturer, Machida blended Kita and Sharp's design teams from the initial stages of development. "Japanese management tends to think that designers are completely ignorant of business strategies," says Takekazu Inoue, senior consultant of brand and design strategies at the Japan Research Institute. "A bunch of doodlers who are only expected to create pretty packages...
...over $1,000 to the low six figures. But she is not the only new artist to capitalize on traditional-with-a-twist. After years of holding down a day job as a graphic designer, Hisashi Tenmyouya's paintings now fetch $50,000 or more. Unlike Matsui or Kumi Machida, who graduated from Tama Art University, Tenmyouya is self-taught, and he brings an autodidact's passion to his work. At his spartan studio on the northeastern outskirts of Tokyo, he kneels placidly on the floor, surrounded by works in progress, many of them featuring the stylized samurai that have...
...While Tenmyouya's work is troubling, Machida's demented and deformed dolls are probably among the most disturbing images you will see from neo-nihonga artists today-as well as the most accomplished. The 37-year-old Machida started out painting in the traditional nihonga style-which emphasizes rich color-before abruptly shifting to drawing only in stark, monotone lines. "Colors weren't really fitting my character," she says (nor, one might add, the bleakness of her subject matter). Her art teachers initially dismissed her new style-"they said it's not painting; it's just manga," she recalls...
...Even more than Tenmyouya's stylized samurai or Matsui's feminist ghosts, Machida's surreal and often frankly sexual paintings-like Little Boy: Good Luck Talisman-seem to have little in common with staid 19th century forms. But Machida says artistic categories are "just brand names," so she doesn't feel as though she is violating some unwritten code. "I admire Japanese painting, but I learned from the tradition without even noticing it." And that's the point. As diverse as they are, as different as they are from their flowers-and-Mount Fuji predecessors, the neo-nihonga painters aren...