Yasuhito Nagahara is a true pioneer, someone who has pursued the possibilities of media and design since the 1980s, when terms like multimedia and media design were just coming into being. In 1984, when the Macintosh was first introduced to Japan, Nagahara was quick to start work on designs that utilized computer technology. That may seem par for the course for a graphic designer these days, but what set Nagahara apart was how he saw computers not as a substitute for pens and rulers, but as a new medium. Nagahara, whose designs came from connecting the digital and the physical, undertook experiments in this area. These bore fruit in the form of a series of e-books and algorithmic typography works.
“Media acts as an intermediary, so media design is the act of designing how media intermediates—i.e., how media pass on messages.” This is the key concept that Nagahara has been expressing in various venues. The “Bridging Time” part of the exhibition title refers to both this retrospective of more than forty years of Nagahara’s media design, and to the way his work spans the past and future of media. The environment surrounding media and design has been transformed completely, as following the appearance of PCs, we saw the arrival of the internet and the greater development of global capitalist society. More recently, waves of new digital technologies—such as generative AI, Spatial computing, and NFTs—are having a major impact on designers’ work. The exhibition’s subtitle, “Exploring Design and NFT,” expresses Nagahara’s latest experiments that capture NFTs as a new medium.
It is our hope that this exhibition will provide people—especially young people who have grown up with computers and the internet ever-present—with the opportunity to learn more about the graphic and media designer Yasuhito Nagahara’s body of work.