After studying under Shiro Kuramata and Issey Miyake, Tokujin Yoshioka established his own office in 2000, focusing on spacial and product design. A large scale recreation of a window he did for Miyake’s Snow collection in 1997 is currently on show at Mori Art Museum for their Sensing Nature exhibition. Comprising nothing but electric fans and hundreds of kilograms of white feathers, which Tokujin considers ‘the lightest material available to us’, the work is the result of the designer’s ongoing fascination with the threshold between visible and invisible. Also on show is a series of watery benches made from an incredibly clear glass that is used in optical lenses and space shuttles (the same material Tokujin used for his Chair that Disappears in the Rain, a public work in Roppongi), and his pure mineral crystal that was induced to grow over 12 months …

Second photo courtesy Mori Art Museum, others by Amelia Groom:

1 & 2 “Snow” 2010 (1997-), 3 “Water Block” 2002, 4 “The Light” 2009.

A new exhibition has just opened at 21_21 Design Site (a foundation that was established by Issey Mikaye and friends in 2007), showcasing 100 objects by product designer  Naoto Fukasawa, accompanied by images of his work from photographer Tamotsu Fujii. It’s always worth a visit there for the architecture alone (an unobtrusive sunken structure by Tadao Ando), and Fukasawa’s clean lines and refined forms fit perfectly with the streamlined, concrete building.

Entitled The Outline the exhibition considers outlines, in objects and photographs, as the boundaries that delineate things in space. While Fukasawa’s design philosophy seeks to examine the way objects exist in the surroundings and how their context fundamentally alters them, Fujii’s photographs typically blur the outline of things so it is unclear where one thing ends and another begins. The exhibition continues until January.