【EXHBITION: Lighting Art】26/8/2011

EXHBITION: Lighting Art ／ Exhibition of design in Ebisuminami for the world

A co-exhibition called "Exhibition : Lighting Art" takes place from 26th August until 4 th September in 3 places : Lighting Art Gallery, limArt,SOMEWHERE in Ebisuminami, Tokyo, where full of edgy independent boutiques and great galleries to go have been opening recently.
This co-exhibition shows how Yamagiwa Art Foundation has played important roles in cultural activities by realizing the collaboration with several designers such as Ettore Sottsass or Shiro Kuramata, who have crossed over the boundaries between art, architecture and design.
After an interval of twenty years, we are glad to present a series of lamp prototypes for "Light is architecture", lamp exhibition in 1990 that Yamagiwa offered to create to Sottsass. The first products from these prototypes of lamp that Sottsass has given the name of number from One to Twenty-nine, will be sold for this co-exhibition.
Also, interesting exhibits have come from "IN・SPIRATION" in 1988 that Kuramata, as a director of exhibition, asked the contemporary designers and architects from overseas to design the lighting under the support of Yamagiwa.
The co-exhibition features precious works in design history ; the ceiling lamp "Warped Plane"created by Zaha Hadid, architect wasn't well known during the period Kuramata ordered, and the Kuramata's "Acrylic Back Chair for Livina Yamagiwa". The space "meeting room for Livina Yamagiwa" designed by Kuramata in 1983 is reconstructed and arranged for this show. We are planning on creating high quality design and art scene and on developing a variety of projects.

Mail: info@lighting-art.jp

TEL: +81-3-6452-2224 (SOMEWHERE)

The Yamagiwa Art Foundation – 50 years of efforts to improve the art of lighting

The Tokyo International Lighting Design Competition (hereafter “the Competition”), was initiated in 1968 by Yamagiwa Corporation, who foresaw the infinite possibilities of lighting and acted upon his desire to create an even more beautiful lighting environment. At that time it was an innovative international competition aimed at promoting Japanese lighting design and international exchange, as well as discovering new designers. In many ways, it was a high-level design competition, attended by eminent architects, designers, and artists both from Japan and abroad. Yusaku Kamekura, who had designed Yamagiwa's Corporate Identity before, took a central role in developing the idea of competition initially. From 1970 to 1983, Kenzo Tange, a giant of the world of architecture, was welcomed as the president of the panel of judges, and the Competition continued to be held with a different theme each year. These sterling efforts were recognized by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, and in 1973 the Yamagiwa Art Foundation (hereafter “the Foundation”) was established and subsequently became the organizer of the Competition.
The degree of innovation shown by the Competition can clearly be seen from the list of judges, guests, and exhibitors, who together form quite an eminent line-up. It is interesting to note that already by 1969, when the Competition was in its second year, Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass was invited to sit on the panel of judges. The collaboration between Yamagiwa and Sottsass continued for a long time after that. In addition, Shiro Kuramata attended the 1972 Competition as a guest, and he also had a very close relationship with Yamagiwa in the years that followed.
The Competition was held for the 10th and final time in 1983, but its legacy lived on, and later, under Kuramata’s supervision, the “In-spiration Exhibition” was held in 1988. At the same time, Yamagiwa opened a showroom / gallery in Roppongi with the same name, and in 1990, it held an exhibition of 29 Lamps designed by Ettore Sottsass, subtitled “Light is Architecture”. Also, in this gallery, periodical exhibitions by active designers selected by Kuramata and Sottsass started to be held with the title “In-spiration” exhibitions under the auspices of the Foundation. Such examples make it clear that all the efforts of the Foundation and of Yamagiwa to promote lighting art started with the Competition. For example, Massimo Iosa Ghini, who held an exhibition at In-spiration, signed a contract for product development with Yamagiwa after the exhibition, which resulted in the commercialisation of a collection of floor lamp and bracket. These efforts are all part of the Competition’s initial goal of promoting lighting design and international exchange, and discovering new designers.
In this exhibition “Lighting Art”, we would like to present some works displayed during some of the shows held under the auspices of the Foundation, after the “In-spiration Exhibition” in 1988. They are all unique, precious, one-off works made for the exhibitions.

Lighting Art Gallery

Light is Architecture – 29 Lamps designed by Ettore Sottsass

In the 1980’s, Ettore Sottsass founded the Memphis Group. After approaching Shiro Kuramata to see if he would be interested in joining forces, the two of them became even closer than before. Their efforts attracted the world’s attention as their activities became ever more closely intertwined, spanning Europe and the Far East, including the launching of the San Francisco apparel brand , Esprit. Then, in 1989, following a suggestion from Kuramata, the Foundation asked Sottsass to design 15 lighting fixtures, proposing a unique exhibition that would show the way forward for new forms of lighting. Expressing his feelings in the book printed for the exhibition, Sottsass uses the expression “Light is Architecture” to name the theme of the exhibition, and explains that he could not be content with only 15 items, so eventually he designed 30 lighting fixtures, out of which 29 were exhibited (7 pendants, 9 floor lamps, 8 brackets, and 5 table stands).
The prototypes were all manufactured in Italy, and the graphics aspect of the book was also the responsibility of Sottsass Associati, and was printed in Milan. As a result, the “Light is Architecture – 29 Lamps designed by Ettore Sottsass” Exhibition was held in 1990 from April 4 to 28 at the In-spiration Gallery in Roppongi. Sottsass visited Japan from April 1 as he wanted to look over the venue before the opening, and he also gave a memorial lecture on April 5; he spent most of his time with Kuramata until he left Japan on April 7.
With the approval and the assistance of Studio Ettore Sottsass s.r.l., in charge of administrating Sottsass’s works and copyright, a limited number of items from among 29 lighting fixtures exhibited have recently been selected for commercialization once again.

15 Lamps for Yamagiwa by Ettore Sottsass

Yamagiwa asked me to design, and to produce here in Italy, the prototypes of 15 lamps, for an exhibition in Tokyo.
When I started thinking about designing the lamps, I found I was never satisfied and always ended up doing another, extra lamp; so I did a lot of drawings and then chose among them and in the end decided that, to mount an exhibition, to put an idea across, 30 lamps were needed. From then on, I got into the highly complicated problem of producing prototypes.
Producing 30 prototypes of lamps actually boils down to a banal, practical matter.
The real difficulty began when I asked myself what can an object that sends light into an architectural interior, into a room, into a corridor, or onto a table, really be like today.
I personally – always – have a strong desire to check the presence of objects around me, of things, signs, memories and miscellaneous pretty, consolatory amusements. In general, I feel a strong psychic and cultural, and ultimately also a political, urge to restrain as far as possible that geological growth, that slow and normally inevitable sedimentation of products for momentary and imprecise uses and vague consumption, which life itself drags along behind it, which life deposits around us.
Therefore are people who fill rooms with faded flags that have fluttered in battles won or lost by their ancestors, or who fill corridors with swords and ancient weapons; there are people who fill rooms with photos of their children and of the children of their children, and even of the children of their sisters and brothers and who also even keep photos of their grandparents’ great-grandparents when they were married and of their uncles and aunts and cousins and photo of themselves with one foot on the head of the tiger they killed and of themselves standing in front of their new car and of themselves being greeted by the Minister and so on.
There are people who deposit in their houses any thing, any residue of parties, celebrations, events, any memory, any sign of power, wealth, conquest, possession.
There are people, too, who fill their houses with lamps, chandeliers, lampshades, bracket-lamps and even candelabra for special dinners, people that is, who don’t fill their homes with “light” but with sundry luminous objects, in bronze, steel, glass, paper, wood, of every kind of material and design. As I said, I personally always feel a strong desire to curb the mechanism of a culture that does nothing but deposit, that draws its energy, its actual justification, its very images, from the fact that it does nothing but deposit.
That’s why it was embarrassing for me to design 15 lamps all at once, and that’s why I designed 30, because as I did each one, I didn’t draw it well enough to make it disappear, as I would have liked. Some additional sign always remained.
I couldn’t do a clear enough design, which would disappear into architecture or become architecture itself, I mean the actual space of light. I was unable to do a design which became a wall or ceiling, or column, or the corner of a wall, or slab, or capital or architrave, instead of staying there to represent an object, just any sign in space, attached to other innumerable signs, to increase the depository of signs. Next Page

15 Lamps for Yamagiwa by Ettore Sottsass

In the ancient Japanese world the problem had not been badly solved. As far as I know, ancient Japanese lamps were small or big luminous boxes that disappeared together with other wooden or lacquered boxes, together with red wooden pieces of box furniture, inside the boxes of rooms which in turn became architecture – groups of boxes with roofs. As a matter of fact, ancient Japanese lamps were small pieces of architecture, fittings, inlays of architecture, melted into architecture to sustain the total design of private, artificial space.
To give a different example, in ancient India not much care was taken over the design of private spaces. All the care was devoted to design of spaces, somehow or for some reason, sacred or, made sacred and in those spaces, in any case, there wasn’t much light; there weren’t any designed lamps, only pots with lights and candles in them resting here and there. But in India there was, as there still is, an immense quantity of light and the majority of problems were clearly dealt with during the day; for that matter today, too, in India, the night don’t have all that many lights, they certainly don’t have the light of Las Vegas, or Ginza and not even the lights of any ordinary California gas station. The nights in India are very vaguely illuminated by a few stray fluorescent tubes or by the occasional, still more ghostly, light-bulb dangling naked in the air. There’s nothing else.
The fact is that in India what used to happen in ancient times, more or less, in the countryside, paddy-fields and forests, on beaches, in deserts and hills all over the Far East, still happens: the attention of design being dedicated only to objects capable of catalyzing ritual processes, objects capable of accompanying the passing of existence from the everyday, frail, provisional, illogical, anxious state, to a compact, conscious, intense, unforgettable state.
“Designed” objects in those ancient cultures, in those ancient spaces, were few and far between. They were objects situated in empty, invisible spaces, in the middle of vast silences; they were mixed into and hidden in the rituality itself.
Those objects were, however, always, very precious, on account of their rarity, of the effort, the hours and the risks undertaken to achieve that special design, but most of all because of the special vibrations which they had the capacity to transmit, because of the special role which they could assume or were intended to assume.
This idea of a different possible function, of a rarer, real and precious destiny for every object designed, or “produced” – as they say today – situated in the space of our existence, has always fascinated me deeply. It was because of this idea which I had in my head, that it seemed to me embarrassing to design 15 lamps all at once.
I finished by designing small boxes (in the Japanese manner), boxes that become columns, or beams, or stacks of boxes, with different variations.

In-spiration

After the Tokyo International Lighting Design Competition was held for the last time in 1983, the Foundation worked out a plan for new activities and a framework for their key points. The core of these efforts was “In-spiration”, born out of a suggestion made by Kuramata, who developed a strong relationship of trust with Yamagiwa over the years of the Competition. It also provided an opportunity for experimenting with lighting environments in keeping with the new age. “In-spiration” was the first to try to express this concept clearly. It was an exhibition in which basic human activities such as eating, reading, and sleeping were turned into a matrix for interior design components such as the floor, the walls, and the ceiling. 21 teams of promising designers and architects from around the world were selected and each was asked to come up with a lighting design from a position they were assigned. In the foreword of the booklet published for the exhibition (IN-SPIRATION, PARCO Co.,Ltd. 1988) Kuramata wrote: “[…] the designs that should be taking shape before our eyes are those that have appeared by already betraying the demands of form and function in some way.” It was a message for architects and designers who were to play a role in the future, a provocative and inflammatory message to temporarily deconstruct and then rebuild design.
The aforementioned Yamagiwa showroom gallery, designed by Kuramata, opened the same year inside the Roppongi AXIS Building, and also serves as one of the bases for propagating this concept. Exhibitions featuring predominantly up-and-coming international designers and architects, selected by Kuramata, have subsequently been held periodically.