A graphic designer, curator, art director and brand strategist, Kenya Hara is known for his uniquely Japanese design philosophy based on notions of emptiness, heightened tactility, escapist colour and archaic form. Forever advocating aesthetics of simplicity and minimalism, he designs almost exclusively in white, insisting that “white is a colour from which colour has escaped, but its diversity is boundless.”

Seeing white as pure, humble, transient and quiet, Kenya relates it to the idea of entropy – the second law of thermodynamics which says all energy is eventually equalised: “white has risen from chaos and the original form of life and information. White is the extremity of negative entropy, driven to cleanly escape from every sort of chaos.”

One property of white is that it allows for the focus to be on form and tactility, rather than colour. A leader in the field of new touch and sensory perception, Kenya believes that the nonappearance of white allows for tactility to intensify. His exclusively white covers designs for A Book magazine (above) since 2006 are testament to this.

White also signifies absence, another cornerstone of Kenya’s philosophy. While in the west we might perceive emptiness as a sense of something lacking, in Zen philosophy it is a positive representation of possibility. Emptiness is like silence, the inner quiet attained through meditation, which sparks creativity and imagination. “A vessel that’s empty has the possibility, precisely because it is empty, to hold things inside. In the same way, abundance lies in possibility – the possibility that exists before anything occurs,” he says.

Since 2002 Kanya has been art director of the Japanese retail company Muji, a brand with a “no brand” policy. With an emphasis on design simplicity, reducing the production process, affordability, recycling and waste avoidance, they have hundreds of flagship stores and stockists throughout Japan and elsewhere. His first campaign for Muji took the team to the Bolivian salt lakes and Mongolian prairies, where photographer Tamotsu Fujii captured these memorable billboard images of emptiness and possibility …