Graphic design exhibitions usually showcase accomplishments; beyond that all that can be displayed are sketches and notes surrounding visuals. There’s no room to expand exhibitions this way though; for Torinoumi’s exhibition I came up with the notion that we could turn the process of creating a typeface itself into the exhibited work. I’m a contemporary art curator, but for Torinoumi’s exhibition I worked on it more like a designer, I feel. I established a theme of making it easy-to-understand with an easy-to-follow space design, while being constantly aware of a universalness.

In addition, though Kyoto ddd Gallery was established primarily for the design world, they’re focused on the “modernity of the non-Western sphere,” I believe. For example, Japanese type takes the Japanese language with its mix of phonograms and ideograms, and creates typefaces by forcing them into squares in uniform succession that is somehow similar to the Latin alphabet; but what is all the homogeneity for in the first place? Torinoumi himself speaks of characters being “like water, like rice,” (i.e. we absorb them without resistance), but on the contrary, isn’t it the forms created by typeface designers like Torinoumi that we are all made to believe is standardized, or we are all institutionalized by? Grid systems do help induce them, but is all the systemisation necessary in the first place? Pleasant visuals and easy to read body typesetting are for whom exactly? In the field of graphic design, there is practically no discussion, or criticism of the West. I hope for more exhibitions dealing with this.