Inspired by imports: Tokyo Designer's Week marries commerce to art in cutting edge expositions

Japan, Inc., March, 2004 by Roland Kelts

TOKYO DESIGNER'S WEEK (TDW) started modestly in 1997 as a way to wed aesthetic aspirations to functional need--and there is no better place than Japan for the nuptials. As one festival organizer told me: "Look around you. Japanese life is full of limitations--of space, of personality, of etiquette and behavior. Limitations are part of our culture. So we must find a way to make our needs into something beautiful. That's the unique challenge of art in Japan."

As with so much in Japan, the inspiration for the first TDW came from elsewhere--specifically, a now defunct 70s-era New York event called "Furniture Saturday," where-in that city's furniture makers displayed their latest wares to aging hipsters looking to refurnish on a budget.

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Last year's TDW went nonprofit and saw its own budget balloon. For the first time, exhibitions incorporated outdoor and indoor venues at several locations (no mean feat in super-vast Tokyo), with free shuttle buses, open discussions, parties and live music running throughout the five nights. The organizers set out to take on all of Japan--or at least all of the country's creative centers--with subsequent events in Osaka and Kyoto featuring international and local designers.

The centerpiece of it all was an attempt to build a futuristic city out of six-foot shipping containers trawled in from the nearby port of Yokohama. Design teams from Japan, Europe and the US were offered their own containers to fill with magic, movies or miasmas on an empty gravel lot in Odaiba, the massive artifical island built from landfill in Tokyo Bay. Artifice built upon artifice--and torn down just as quickly as it appeared.

"Japan is a country built on imports; this is something specific to Japan," explains managing director Kenji Kawasaki. "We figured that using the containers would be a symbolic way to reflect on contemporary culture and rethink its purposes."

The result was somewhere between a Fassbinder fairground and a postmodern museum. Odaiba is about 40 minutes from anywhere in central Tokyo; you take a sky-tram to get there, passing over the sleek Rainbow bridge (featured in Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill"), and for the first time in this allegedly bayside city, you can actually smell and feel the saline seas.

Wouter Roeterink, a German designer, filled his container with an interactive game called the "Octopuzzle." Visitors sat down and performed the analog task of making design happen with bits of plastic and wooden boards. His first impression upon landing in Tokyo is revealing: "I thought: These containers are like the cockroaches of the world," Roeternik said. "If an A bomb blew away all those big buildings, the containers would remain."

Prize-winning students from 40 of Japan's finest design schools were selected to produce--chairs! Nothing more functional, but nowhere less aesthetic: in open rectangular pits in the gravel sat places for sitting. "Suwaru Katachi: The Way We Sit" offered an interactive experience of the most mundane--and magical. Visitors sipped glasses of wine and champagne as they perched atop oblong seats of steel or sunk into banana-shaped bronzes. The chairs provided a breather from the intensity of the containers. Yet like everything in Tokyo, the chairs themselves were part of the art. (Art and etiquette are intertwined in Tokyo: The way you handle your chopsticks can define you as an aesthete before you've taken a bite.)

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"Actually, it's more than a temporary festival," Kawasaki confides. "We want the next generation to the nurtured here."

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Government-sponsored Tokyo designers produced the Tokyo Wonder Site--an extraordinary display of visionary talent in two containers, with two competing deejays ensconced atop each one, blaring funky beats in wicked polyrhythms. Inside their containers, bulbous, dismembered feminine bodies hung in space to evoke "the future of mannequins," according to one dude who smoked incessantly beside me, banging on a bongo. The eerie and vaguely grotesque collided with department store sterility. The bodies bore the colors of dimestore gumballs.

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Eriko Horiki, an internationally celebrated washi artist, invited 400 primary school students to mold roundish washi lamps that light up in concentric curves, creating an elaborate whorl of light that suggested the illuminated interior of a human mouth or heart. Her washi lamps are meant to make your home or work space more organic. "Paper is a material which is a mixture of people, nature and technique," she says. "That is why Japanese use white paper to wrap money and gifts and put white paper underneath offerings for God. Kami (paper in Japanese) stands for spirituality, just as Kami also means God."

Fredrik Cederroth, a designer with Stockholm Design Lab in Sweden, sums up the appeal of Japan as a home for your future--and mine: "Japan lacks the orthodox opinions concerning good taste," he says. "In Europe, the design elite decides upon what is good taste, and deviations from this norm are rare. Japan has a liberal attitude toward both design and architecture. They are not yet locked up in what many Europeans mean when they say 'good taste'--which tends to become a prison for creative people."