Posts Tagged japan

Hiroyuki Hamada: Sculptor

hiroyuki2012

Hiroyuki

Hamada vs Hamada: An Interview with artist Hiroyuki Hamada by Jeff Hamada

Hiroyuki Hamada

I always get excited when I find an artist whose work I want to follow.  Hiroyuki is one of them.  Richard Gailbraith wrote an article: Japan:Creative – Introduction, on CEMENTUM in August 2012, in which he included a statement of Hiroyuki’s work.  I cannot say it better then him, that Hiroyuki’s work “oozed sci-fi whilst retaining an intrinsic ‘Japaneseness’ about it.  It connotes to me Zen gardens and the post apocalypse at the same time.”  Jeff Hamada, from Booooooom,  ‘randomly came across Hiroyuki Hamada’s work, following a link from Newstoday.’  He shares the same name but in terms of immediate family they are completely unrelated. After seeing his amazing work he thought it would be fun to contact Hiroyuki and see if he would allow him to interview him, I mean how could he say no to family?

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Shoden-sanso

 

Shoden-sanso (by sakura_chihaya+)

Kyoto, Japan

Longing to find this feeling of calm…

 

 

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Octopus

Isoda Koryusai

Source: taosozugalactor

蛸壺やはかなき夢を夏の月
takotsubo ya hakanaki yume o natsu no tsuki

an octopus pot —
inside, a short-lived dream
under the summer moon

Matsuo Basho

 

“An octopus that has entered the pot is content with the small world of its own and enjoys a night’s dream, never suspecting that it might be pulled up in the morning. A man born into this world is like that, too, as he lives a life as brief as a dewdrop. Such a view is presented in this poem. In view of the site, there may be historical allusions, too.”  –Koseki

“Isn’t it impossible to imagine that Basho had completely entered the mind of an octopus inside the pot? He became an octopus, so to speak.”  -Watsuji

And still another interpretation:

“In the Japanese poetic tradition, those who complain of the shortness of the summer night are, above all, lovers who have to part in the morning. Basho drew upon that traditional mood of romantic love and applied it to the life of an octopus dreaming a short dream in a pot, thereby turning it into humor.”  -Yamamoto

The aforementioned haiku and commentary were
translated by Professor Emeritus Makoto Ueda.

 Note about the print:  Isoda Koryūsai (礒田湖龍斎 1735-1790?) was a Japanese printmaker and painter active from approximately 1764 to 1788.  (via Wikipedia)

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Water Branch House

WATER BRANCH HOUSE

Exhibition title: MOMA Home Delivery Fabricating the Modern Dwelling
Venue: The Museum Of Modern Art, New York / 11 West 53 Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, NY, USA
2008.07.20 – 2008.10.20
Installation
1.2 m2

KENGO KUMA AND ASSOCIATES

Water block is a piece of plastic tank. By piling them up, you can build anything from furniture to a house. It is very light and easy to carry around. Water or other types of liquid can be stored inside. It is in the shape that each cube of 100×100mm is connected staggeringly so they can be turned into a variety of shapes. Furthermore, it can form a strong structure by joining its concave and convex firmly.

The weight of Water Block can be adjusted by the volume of liquid that you pour inside, and it also can be used as a safe to keep the water for emergency. By connecting the pieces, liquid can flow into the next block and run around within the tanks. By doing so, Water block can function not only as a structure but also as many other roles:
– Thermal insulation
– Network wiring
– Filtering by concave and convex, water purification system with precipitation tank
– Absorbing shock with its soft material
– Lighting equipment
– Storing rainwater
– Greening of wall and floor
– Change its role by the thing you put inside (such as mud, sand, concrete, opaque liquid, etc.)
– Hydroelectric generation

Moreover, Water block is a trial case of using PET, the Hydro/Biodegradable polyester that can eventually go back to the ground. If it is successful, a new sustainable recycling system will be realized that takes the route from a container, to construction material, and to soil.

And I would like to refer you to check out more on neo-modernism by reading

HOME DELIVERY: FABRICATING THE MODERN DWELLING , a MOMA article

that includes a great video of modern dwelling through the years.  Kengo Kuma and

Associates also designed a Starbuck’s in Japan that is out of this world.

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Angel

宮原夢画「Angel

                     GELATIN SILVER SESSION

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A New Face for the Cat

Linda Butler

Rural Japan

Noh and KyÔ gen Masks, Yamagata-ken

 

on the year’s last night

a new face for the cat…

devil’s mask

Issa

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Japanese Cranes

at the gate
so many in the mist!
Sumida River cranes

Issa

via shogunpassion:

Japanese cranes by Dennis Binda

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This Autumn Evening

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by  Ohara Koson

           No one travels
           Along this way but I,
           This Autumn evening.
                                             -Basho

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Fish Shop of the Town

Copyright All rights reserved by sora018

Rolleiflex SL66SE Planar 80mm

In Japan, the fish means well-being, happiness and freedom. It is one of the Eight Auspicious Symbols used in Buddhism imported from China. The fish symbolises living in a state of fearlessness, without danger of drowning in the ocean of sufferings, and migrating from place to place freely and spontaneously.

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House Taishido

The Cat House (Neko no le)

courtesy of Key Operation Inc.

Neko no le (The Cat House) A century ago, the famous Japanese novelist Sosuke Natsume wrote a novel called “I Am a Cat (Wagahai Wa Neko De Aru).” It is written from the point of view of a cat. The cat, who remains nameless during the novel’s first chapter, lives in a house with a teacher and his family. He is angry that he is not regarded as an equal member of the family in this household. “I will never catch mice,” the cat announces haughtily, not wishing to make himself useful. What if, however, there was a house, which has been designed specifically with a cat in mind? What would it look like? The Japanese architect Akira Koyama of Key Operation Inc. has recently designed a house for a young family, which included a pet cat, in the densely populated Taishido district, west of Tokyo. Undoubtedly, this house would have made Natsume’s cat green with envy.Neko no Ie (The Cat House) stands on a typically compact, rectilinear site (7 meters wide, 12 meters deep) along a narrow residential street, just big enough for a single car to pass through. Although the plot is small, the client (including the cat) did not specify the need for an outdoor garden space, and so the architect decided to set the house back by 3 meters from the street, thereby creating a void, synonymous in Japan with a sense of luxury. The upper section of the house is further set back from the ground level, generating a balcony.It is generally perceived that the Japanese architects have a greater freedom of expression than the Western counterparts but we forget that there are a number of restrictions that the Japanese architects face when designing buildings in Japan, and this is no exception. There is a law, for example, restricting the owning of a car to those who can ensure its parking space. Neko no Ie, like many houses on the street, accommodates a garage within the house. The architect faced yet another restriction imposed in this area. It forbade the use of bright colours on exterior facades so that the ‘scenery’ of the area is conserved. Neko no Ie’s grey stucco façade complies with this regulation. Undeterred, however, Koyama subtly managed to subvert both of these restrictions by painting the inside of the garage bright pink, therefore making a feature out of what is usually a dark and dingy space and injecting much-needed playfulness in this otherwise boring grey neighbourhood.

The house’s asymmetrical roofline maximizes both its playfulness as well as its volume. The architect has created within a complex interior space consisting of rooms of varying sizes, which are stack on top of each other over three floors. One would not be able to observe such a structure from outside of the house, but it reflects the layout of the area, which has a mixture of detached houses, both large and small. The biggest room in the house is the dining/living room, stretched horizontally to fit the whole width of the house. By extending the room vertically, the architect has opened up this room to the rest of the house. What look like shelves jutting out of one wall of this room are actually steppingstones for the pet cat to enter into the adjacent rooms through the openings placed higher up on the wall. This arrangement leaves the ample staircase and landings, which double up as a library, undisturbed from the burst of activities of the feline member of the family, while the rest of the family uses them as a place of quietude. Moreover, just as the garage became the visual focal point for the exterior of the house, the staircase, painted also brightly pink, signals a gathering of all the separate interior sections of Neko no Ie.

By varying the sizes of the rooms and painting them in different colours, the architect has emphasized their uniqueness and separateness. At the same time, he has managed to link the rooms through small and large openings so that none of the rooms is completely isolated. Autonomy is respected but isolation is discouraged. For instance, a large opening in the wall of the dining/living room, which looks into the kitchen, allows the person who is cooking to connect with the person who is being served. In the meantime, the cat can slip into the study located above the kitchen through yet another, this time smaller, opening. The rooms’ co-dependence is thus implicitly emphasized. Neko no Ie is a symbolic celebration of the emergence of the modern Japanese family, more democratic than the traditional one preceding it, allowing each member to flourish independently while nurturing a supportive environment. Ironically, a pet cat was an integral part of it.

(Text by Yuki Sumner 2011)

Client:

Private

Project partners:

Structural Engineer: aR Structural Engineering
Construction: Tokyo Gumi

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