This exhibition covered an expansive range of Eiko Ishiokaʼs creative work. Included were her famed works created for ad campaigns for Shiseido and PARCO, film and theater posters, record jacket designs, and book designs. The exhibition focused on her works made prior to her move to New York in the early 1980s. Also on display were works and materials demonstrating Ishiokaʼs creative passion, especially her editorial instructions and rough sketches offering a glimpse into her creative process. The gallery was also decorated with numerous quotes from her many years working in creative design.
ID
ddd_230
Exhibition Name
SURVIVE - EIKO ISHIOKA
Period
October 16, 2021–December 18, 2021
Exhibition Type
Traveling exhibition from ggg to ddd
Venue
ddd Uzumasa, Kyoto
Featured Designers
Poster Designers
Direction
Design
Exhibition Composition
Exhibition Visuals
Exhibition Commentary
posted on YouTube- Speaker: KAWAJIRI Koichi
Koichi Kawajiri, who served as director of this exhibition and who wrote a biography of Eiko Ishioka ("TIMELESS"), gave an introduction to the show’s highlights. Among the many works on display, he first focused on “Symposium: Discovery Today,” Ms. Ishioka’s series of posters for a fictional symposium for which she received a Japan Advertising Artists Club (JAAC) Award, becoming the first female designer in Japan to win that award. Mr. Kawajiri noted that from recently discovered paste-ups of the posters it became known that this work consisted of prints of various cut-outs photographed from various angles. He next turned to the posters Ms. Ishioka created in 1977 as part of PARCO’s promotional campaign, an assignment that continued for 10 years during the 1970s. The 1977 posters, Mr. Kawajiri noted, were the most difficult to photograph. They featured women from a tribe in Rajasthan, India, and it took a month for permission to shoot was granted. When permission was finally received, the lens was trained on a large group of women who appeared out of the desert. For the cover of jazz king Miles Davis’s “TUTU” album, Ms. Ishioka called on the services of photographer Irving Penn. The photos chosen focused on the artist’s face and hands, shot in monochrome. The album received a Grammy Award. Mr. Kawajiri closed the Gallery Talk with an introduction to the special area in the gallery where visitors could take snippets of Eiko’s words to keep.
ddd「SURVIVE - EIKO ISHIOKA ／石岡瑛子 デザインはサバイブできるか」展覧会解説動画
Talking about Eiko Ishioka
posted on YouTube- Participants: KAWAJIRI Koichi、TANIGUCHI Sumihiro
The recording of a talk event held at Chignitta, a creative art space operated in Osaka by Yoshihiro Taniguchi, was edited in abbreviated form for online distribution. In Part 1, Mr. Kawajiri related a large number of anecdotes demonstrating what an amazing person Eiko Ishioka was. In Part 2, he spoke about how he interviewed Eiko in New York about her costume design for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and then shortly after that learned of her death in "The New York Times." In Part 3, from among Eiko’s works shown at ddd he talked about her posters for PARCO featuring Indian tribeswomen and about Eiko’s stance treating even the paste-up director as a member of her creative team. Mr. Taniguchi spoke about how advertising and communication have changed from the days when outsize posters flourished – the times when Eiko Ishioka was active – and today, in the days of social media. In the final section, Mr. Kawajiri commented on how Eiko, known for her amazing power and overwhelming energy, was a charming person who also had an aspect of fragility, harboring boundless contradictions. The talk concluded with the observation that knowing about Eiko Ishioka can serve a good purpose for Japanese today who are troubled and conflicted.
ddd 「石岡瑛子を語る」河尻亨一×谷口純弘（大阪・京町堀「チグニッタ」にて）
Gallery
Photographer: YOSHIDA Akihito