Art and Design Converge in Osaka

Osaka Art & Design returns for a second year, bringing together culture, craft and commerce under the theme of ‘resonance’

Until 25 June, criss-crossing the restless, gridded streets of Japan’s third largest city is more rewarding than usual. Osaka Art & Designoccupies a similar space in the cultural calendar as Designart, its Tokyo counterpart held in October. The Osaka version is a month-long affair, taking place in venues across the Kansai metropolis with events aimed at bridging the worlds of art and design.

Storied retailer Hankyu Hanshin Department Stores Inc. is hosting its take on an art fair at its flagship Umeda location. The department store has given space to individual galleries as well as more interactive formats, such as flower artist Kota Mochizuki’s monumental sculpture (pictured, above) of plants growing out of tree roots, which is suspended from the ceiling of the pedestrian passage outside the store.

Some of the programmed events conclude earlier than others. Until 9 June, Osaka-based furniture, interiors and branding studio Graf is showing Material Echo (pictured, above), an exhibition of sculptural furniture made from raw wood, in its shop, cafe and gallery Graf Porch. The rather fragrant series is a celebration of timber in all its natural beauty, and alongside the exhibition, the studio has released smaller versions of some of its other furniture in an effort to adapt to an evolving consumer profile.

Also on until Sunday, local interiors, product and architecture outfit Sides Core has created a small installation in their office to release new colours of its Triangles series (pictured, below) of geometric but non-symmetrical lamps, originally released in 2011.

Pop-up collectible design gallery Hizo Market (pictured, above) is curated by Kyoto-based Shinichiro Masui and includes work by the likes of Teruhiro Yanagihara, Yohei Kikuchi, Daisuke Kitagawa and Graf founder Shigeki Hattori.

Most of the other events run almost until the end of June. Paper Altar (pictured, below) is a collaboration between paper supplier Takeo and Buddhist altar producer Wakabayashi Butsugu, and the exhibition in Takeo’s Yodoyabashi store shows small paper sculptures by designers Haruka Misawa and Koichiro Oniki.

Department store Takashimaya is displaying a collaboration between Nuno and design studio we+ (pictured, above), a series of suspended rotating cubes covered in textiles by Nuno design director Reiko Sudo, while one level down is Nuno’s collaboration with lacquer maker Wajima Kirimoto.

Louis Vuitton is using its Espace gallery to show Ten Thousand Waves (pictured, below), an immersive video installation by British artist Isaac Julien, produced in collaboration with some of China’s leading artistic voices. The work is an evocative, vivid depiction of 1930s Shanghai contrasted against its modern incarnation and features the likes of Maggie Cheung and Zhao Tao.

Italian furniture giant Cassina’s outpost in the city, meanwhile, is showing Fragment of Space, a collaboration between designer Reiichi Ikeda and washi artist Wataru Hatano. The exhibition consists of a series of washi-covered byobu screens that appear to float thanks to their acrylic bases, and the series was created exclusively for the festival.

Osaka Art & Design represents an expansive roster of names attached to a vast number of individual activations. Taken on their own, the events may be fairly small in scale, but as a cross-section of some of the region’s most interesting designers and artists, the combination is an ambitious and worthwhile undertaking.

Text by Jeremy Smart
Images courtesy of Osaka Art & Design