From Tokyo With Love: Designing Connections Across the Pacific

Written by Patrick McDonald
Edited by Eric Gold

It’s the first Thursday in March and Portland’s Compound Gallery is hosting a Japanese wake. The smell of incense emanating from the shrine built in the center of the gallery is thick, but the traditional offerings of sake and rice have been replaced by spray-paint can caps and what appears to be trucker speed tablets. Black and white, the traditional colors of a Japanese wake, or otsuya, dominate the art on display. Mounds of salt, a traditional symbol of purification and good luck, are heaped on the floor of the room’s four corners, tea is being served, and attendance is good. The three artists, who arrived from Japan only four days ago, couldn’t look happier.

Tenga, Shohei, and Imaone, a trio of graffiti and graphic artists from Tokyo, devised the theme of a wake as a way to explore ideas they couldn’t at home. Shohei’s drawings depict sharp, realistic images of people being shot, captured right after the moment of impact. He says that he has always found Japanese funeral rituals to be beautiful, but too dark and sad. He wanted to exhibit his work, which is exclusively in black, white, and red, in the clean, ceremonial environment of an otsuya, but without the usual somber connotations. He says Portland allowed him the freedom to present his art in a way that he couldn’t in Japan.

Located in Old Town, Compound Gallery has become ground zero for Japanese artists to show their work in Portland. Curated by Matt Wagner, Compound has hosted numerous openings, often giving artists their first show in the states. “There’s still a big buzz in Japan about showing your work in America,” says Wagner. “It’s become more of a prestigious thing to show your work here. America is still viewed by many Japanese people as being the source of all things cool.”

But for the Portlanders visiting the otsuya show on First Thursday, it was the Tokyo designers that had everyone talking. The biggest buzz was about a piece that wasn’t even for sale: a four-panel, collaborative, floor-to-ceiling mural the artists created in the gallery space in honor of the show. It integrated the work and styles of all three artists and took them three fourteen-hour days to complete—they put the finishing touches on it just before the opening.

There’s evidence that Portland’s fascination with Japan is a two-way street. On the last Thursday of every month, in the Aoyama and Omotesando neighborhoods of Tokyo, art galleries, restaurants, and bars feature the work of local artists and designers. The event is called “Last Thursday”—in English—just like the Alberta Street event here in Portland. Last September, in the middle of an annual citywide five-day international design showcase called Design Week, there was an evening dubbed “Portland Night.” In attendance were Portland artists and musicians such as DJ Gregarious, as well as representatives of some of Portland’s more iconic local businesses, such as the Ace Hotel and Stumptown Coffee Roasters. There are plans for another Portland Night during Design Week this year and a similar event is in the works for Portland called “Tokyo Night.”

Much of the synergy between the two cities can be attributed to the efforts of Tokyo design guru Teruo Kurosaki. Neither a designer nor an artists himself, Kurosaki has been at the forefront of establishing trends and tastes for Tokyo design for several decades. He owns two design retail chains, Idee and Sputnik, which introduced many Japanese people to Western designers such as Philippe Starck and Jasper Morrison. He also launched the career of international designer extraordinaire Marc Newson when he hired the Australian to design chairs for Idee. In 2000 Kurosaki created Tokyo Designers Block, modeled on London’s designersblock, which is now an event that has incarnations in Milan, Frankfurt, and Stockholm. The idea, in each case, is to take streetwise designers and allow them to show their work in a non-corporate environment. The result was something reminiscent of a street festival, with mini-events happening in over two hundred bars, restaurants, and galleries in the Aoyama and Omotesando districts. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Kurosaki sits atop a design empire—an empire that is currently promoting Portland Night and Last Thursday events in Tokyo.

It might be tempting to think of this as simply a marketing ploy, a way to boost tourism, a way to draw attention to the nonstop flights to Tokyo that now leave PDX daily—in short, a rather convenient way of promoting the Portland and Tokyo brands to each city and making a little money in the process. And that might not be entirely wrong. Travel Portland, an independent public relations firm the city hired to boost tourism and press coverage of the city, has signed on to be a sponsor of the next Portland Night in Tokyo, and several other local businesses will also be sponsors. However, people in the design community might not be so cynical. They have been forging these connections for years.

High-profile Portland companies, such as Nike, have opened up offices in Tokyo. The internationally renowned Portland-based design firm Ziba has offices in Tokyo as well. Advertising juggernaut Wieden+Kennedy opened their Tokyo office in 1998, and five years later launched W+K Tokyo Lab, a music label whose purpose, according to the company web site, is “all about being in Tokyo now and using the power of the city to attract the most creative collaborators from around the world.”

John Jay, Wieden+Kennedy’s executive creative director, splits his time between Portland, Tokyo, and Beijing and shares Kurosaki’s desire to build a bridge between Portland and Tokyo. His latest venture is Ping, a Japanese-style izakaya restaurant in Chinatown, right across the street from Compound. Jay urged mayor Sam Adams to take a peek at 798 Art Factory during the mayor’s trip to Beijing in September. Blogging about his impressions, the mayor noted, “John Jay thinks that Old Town/Chinatown can be a hot spot for Asian contemporary culture and art.... I see why John Jay sees a fit for modern Asian art and culture in Portland: quirky, weird, and wonderful. And no other U.S. city has a ‘lock’ on it.”

In 2005, Jay and Kurosaki held a public discussion about the need for greater creative interchange between the two cities. The next year, the Pacific Northwest College of Art hosted a day-long symposium called Tokyo Flow, in which Jay and Kurosaki were joined by representatives of the fields of product design, graphic design, architecture, publishing, advertising, and art from both sides of the Pacific. The purpose of the meeting was to examine the way Japanese culture flowed eastward to America and the impact that it had on Portland’s design community. For those in the field, the connection was already clear. Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who attended the 2006 symposium, said that “Portland has become the direct bridge with Japan.”

Kurosaki is a frequent visitor to Portland and sees the independent culture of the city as a source of inspiration. One of his many projects in Japan is the Ikijiri Institute of Design, where he encourages his students, many of whom are already successful professionals in another field, to pursue their dream of living a creative life. In a culture in which the image of the salary man looms large as a role model, Kurosaki offers his students something entirely different—freedom and independence. To show his students what this can look like on a large scale, he brings his graduating class to Portland every year. This past year he brought over thirty of his students, who sampled First Thursday events and attended backyard bar-b-cues at the homes of Portland artists.

Writing for a New York Times Style Magazine column last year, Kurosaki said that the implosion of the Japanese economy “cleared the way for a new generation of influencers who shunned the business card uniformity of Japan Inc. and instead proudly wore the badge of independence.” That independent spirit seems to be what draws Tokyo artists to Portland.

Matt Wagner hosted one of these backyard parties. “I think he wants them to snap themselves out of the typical Japanese mold,” Wagner says of Kurosaki and his students. “One of the reasons that he likes Portland is because of its independent spirit. I think he wants to show them that it’s okay to go do this back in Japan.”

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Patrick McDonald is a writer and high school English teacher. His is a contributing author and editor of Classroom Publishing: A Practical Guide for Teachers, which will be published by Ooligan Press in Spring, 2010. He lives in Portland, Oregon.