In 2016 kyoto ddd gallery kicks the new year off with "Asaba's Assimilation," a solo exhibition of works by Katsumi Asaba, an art director who today enjoys supreme renown and popularity both at home in Japan and worldwide. "Assimilation," Asaba's keyword for this show, is a concept put forward by art historian Yuji Yamashita linking Japanese art traditions with contemporary design. So taken was Asaba by Yamashita's novel approach that he lost no time creating a piece of calligraphy citing the word, which is written with three characters literally meaning "changing to flesh and blood."

Asaba is an artist whose intense curiosity and insatiable appetite for self-development fuel an interest in things old and new, Eastern and Western, everything from the noblest pursuits to sub- and pop culture. All of these he assimilates, sublimating them into his inimitable style of design with graceful suppleness infused with a contrasting streak of unbending determination.

Asaba is the embodiment of Yamashita's hopes to see the emergence of a designer who "voraciously chomps on the rich nutrients of Japanese art, gulps them down, ingests them to his core, and converts them into his own flesh and blood." The numerous designs Asaba has assimilated have gone through several organic permutations – first at ggg (Tokyo), continuing at CCGA (Fukushima), and now here, changed again, in Kyoto.

Our hope is that young artists destined to form the next generation in design will come to know Asaba's design work – work deriving from his unabated quest to create, his almost tenacious powers of continuity, and his physical robustness honed through his endeavors in lettering, calligraphy and table tennis – and then assimilate it into their own new flesh and blood.