To call it understatement would be an understatement. The Cosmic Wonder headquarters in Tokyo is a supremely minimalist space in the back streets of Aoyama, where everything is perfect and perfectly placed. While it houses their men’s and women’s lines, they’ve overcome the predicament of cluttered display with a technique of ‘non-display’: putting all items behind the white walls. Said white walls are opened up for visitors who are deemed worthy, and the centre also houses their artworks and flawlessly designed publications. On display until the end of this week are original prints from their Cosmic Wonder Free Press Sunday Edition for the current Light Source collection (see below), featuring photographers Laetitia Benat, Takashi Homma, Henry Roy and Mark Borthwick.

A selection of Cosmic Wonder Light Source and Cosmic Wonder Free Press are available in Australia from Via Alley.

Fans of the legendary poster artist Tadanori Yokoo should be making the most of cheap flights to Japan this October. His solo exhibition What’s Your’s Is Mine, What’s Mine Is Mine at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa is closing on November 3, and he has work featured in various group shows around the country this month. He also has a Moleskin notebook in a special exhibition at the MoMa design store on Omotesando featuring 50 Moleskins from prominent Japanese and international artists, authors, architects, designers and others, which can all be browsed freely at the display or on the website. And if that’s not enough of a Tadanori hit, an exhibition of his recent photographic series on Tokyo Y-Junctions has just opened at Nishimura Gallery, accompanied by a new publication that would be perfect for hitting things with …

Everybody knows Japanese architects have got it going on. While we marvel at their edifaces all the time, it is less comon to be able to peek behind the ‘walls’ into their prepatory processes. In recent flea market rummaging I scored Drawings by Contemporary Japanese Architects, comprising diverse 2D work from 87 vivionary architects. Many represent purely fantastical renderings or projects which were abandoned before construction. The book was published in ‘82, way back before 3D design software took over from architects properly cultivating hand-drawing skills.

Risa Nakazawa works as an artist coordinator and marketing manager for GAS Japan. As a company, GAS does so many things that we feel slightly dizzy writing them down. Through the GASBOOKS publishing arm, CALM & PUNK GALLERY and 20,000,000 fragments (20MF) fashion label, GAS provides a platform for artists all over the world to showcase their work to a wider audience. Recently, GAS also started workshops that connect kids with artists to hopefully “make world little bit happier with the creative mind-set”. Risa took time out to chat briefly with us about the latest GAS projects…

What are the focuses for GAS this year?

One of our biggest projects this year is with UNIQLO, the largest fashion apparel company in Japan. We’ve been licensing graphics and projects to them for few years now, but this year the relationship has grown even stronger. (Watch this space!) 20MF is another big project for GAS, as we started the distribution of our collection in Australia this year through Via Alley. Finally, our own t-shirt brand, GASBOOK tee, is growing in popularity all over the world. We already send tees to Asia and Oceania, but this year we’re hitting Europe too. We are also planning to launch a website so that consumers can directly purchase tees, because we are only selling through retailers at the moment.

Calm & Punk Gallery

Can you tell us a bit about the vision for 20MF this season?

The concept of 20MF this season is “fabricated with touch of antique”. Tamami Akiyama, the designer of 20MF, has taken up the challenge to create new silhouettes with respect to traditional tailoring techniques. She wants each garment to live a long life; to be passed on over generations.

Has Tamami been working with anyone to create this aesthetic?

For the past two seasons 20MF has worked closely with Australian artist Jonathan Zawada. Jonathan’s work is always beyond our expectations; it’s highly original and very delicate.

Jonathan Zawada for 20MF

You also run CALM & PUNK GALLERY, what have you got coming up?

We are very excited to be releasing our new book series, CALM & PUNK BOOKS. This series was recently established by representative director of GAS / CALM & PUNK GALLERY, Shinjiro Nishino. The first release features Japanese pixel designer ten_do_ten. The book will be released July 21 and CALM & PUNK GALLERY will also host an art show to celebrate the launch.

Can you tell us a little more about ten_do_ten?

Of course! ten_do_ten uses pixels as his form of graphic expression. He started as a solo artist in 2001 and has worked on numerous projects including record sleeve designs, book covers, web design and mobile phone interfaces. His work is so original, it imprints itself on your memory!

ten_do_ten book for GAS

While western architecture has traditionally sought to provide shelter from the natural world, Japanese homes and buildings have always strived to integrate outside with inside. The Japanese garden, for example, is situated in the centre of the home, including the natural world in the domestic space and providing a sense of simultaneous interior and exterior.

In a short time Kazuya Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA have achieved international acclaim with projects around the world such as the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Louvre Annex, Lens, France; the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio; and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan.

Giving Sydneysiders a first-hand taste of their unique architectural aesthetic, a new instillation commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation is now on show at the SCAF gallery in Paddington. Continuing Sejima and Nishizawa’s recent experiments with acrylic, the space is reconfigured into an organically curved labrynth which plays with the gentle separations of gradual curvature and synthesises interior and exterior spaces. Also evident is the same emphasis on transparency, reflections, ambiguity and spatial illusion that is found in their architecture.

The ‘architectural intervention’ is on show until the end of September and is accompanied by a beautifully published SCAF catalogue (pictured above), which includes an essay by Yuko Hasegawa, Chief Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. On August 15 there will also be a free public lecture by Kazuyo Sejima followed by Margaret Throsby in conversation with Yuko Hasegawa and Kazuyo Sejima. The talk starts at 3pm at Tusculum Auditorium in Potts Point, with reservations to be made at eleni.ragogo@raia.com.au.

“Inspirational architecture provides us with work, living and leisure spaces that elevate the spirit and enrich the senses. We owe a great debt to those whose buildings reflect our highest aspirations and our need for both contemplation and community interaction.”

(Dr Gene Sherman)

Photos from Tokyo and my Daughter, published by Nieves

Takashi Homma wields his camera with the exactitude of a surgeon. Tokyo’s dusky suburbs, rigid parking lots, discarded McDonald’s cups, miniscule rooftop gardens and shadowy shopping window reflections all yield to his crisp gaze. His Tokyo Children and Tokyo Teens – dubbed ‘homo transcendants’ in an essay by po-mo maverick Douglas Coupland – are placed on par with the city itself; its living embodiment, inscrutable, chilly, endlessly intriguing. Interestingly, the doe-eyed child offered up as ‘My Daughter’ in a series is not in fact Homma’s, but a friend’s – is fiction or form here stronger? Homma drains Tokyo of (real) sentiment, of all sugariness. Yet it is elbow-deep in resonance and beauty. In his later years, he works on the visual duplicity of architectural structures and intimate spaces (a stolen glimpse through a bedroom door). If he is a surgeon, his camera his machine of operation, then increasingly we detect a bedside manner.

Meet Takeshi Hamada’s pet tiger. The type designer and art director founded the e-magazine as a project back in his student days. Since 2000 it has existed as a platform for visual experimentation with the only restriction being the dimensions of the virtual ‘pages’. Luckily for us, all back issues are archived on tiger.org, making for a mouth-watering buffet of utterly original graphic design, illustration, page layout and photography.

These pages are from last issue of Tiger, which was way back in ’07. Here’s hoping there’s more to come.