Exhibition information
kyoto ddd gallery the 241st exhibition Yasuhito Nagahara—Bridging Time: Exploring Design and NFT
March 27, 2024 - May 26, 2024
“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.
Venue
kyoto ddd gallery
3F COCON KARASUMA, 620
Suiginya-cho Karasuma-dori Shijo-sagaru, Sihmogyo-ku, Kyoto City 600-8411
tel. 075-585-5370/fax. 075-585-5369
Opening hours
11:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m. (6:00 p.m. on weekends and holidays)
Closed
Mondays (or the following day if Monday is a holiday), and the day after a public holiday (except Saturdays or Sundays).
*Closed Tuesday April 30 and Tuesday May 7 as these follow public holidays.
Access
A short walk from the Shijo Karasuma City Bus stop, Shijo Station on the Subway Karasuma Line (exit 2), and Karasuma Station on the Hankyu Kyoto Line (exits 23 and 25).
No parking
Free admission
Organizer
DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion
Cooperation
Taihei Shii(startbahn)
Shunsuke Takao
Nicole Schmid
Akihiro Kato
Harumi Kusumi
Yasuhito Nagahara
Born in Osaka Prefecture in 1955, Yasuhito Nagahara is a graphic designer who completed a doctoral course at the Graduate School of Arts at Kyoto City University of Arts. In 1983, he set up The Nagahara Office Inc. After stints at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS) as a part-time professor, and as a part-time lecturer in the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies at Keio University (Shonan Fujisawa Campus), Nagahara was appointed professor of Information Design at Tama Art University in 2006, a position that he left in 2023. Nagahara has also involved himself in electronic media and exhibition projects, and is promoting design that straddles different media. In 2005 and 2008, he successively acted as artistic director for Expo 2005’s Cyber Japan Pavilion in Aichi, and for Expo 2008’s Japanese Pavilion website in Zaragoza, Spain. He has also published a number of books, including 1999’s designing with computers, 2010’s The Design Landscape, 2016’s The Stream of Information Graphics, and 2022’s Form to Read—Media Design Practice Bridging the Digital and Physical. He has also supervised translations of others’ books into Japanese: Interaction of Color by Josef Albers in 2016; ISOTYPE, an anthology of works by Otto Neurath, in 2017; and Designing Programmes by Karl Gerstner in 2020.