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Your Guide to Design and Pop Culture in Tokyo

Suzuki Nao

Suzuki Nao is an artist that attacks all mediums: video, photography (traditional and mobile), painting, sculptures… She’s done VJ performances, and had a few gallery shows already. Based in Yokohama, where she shares a studio space (Ateliero-Eksperimentoj) with a band, she is currently preparing some video work for a contest. Robert wrote this about her a while back:

“Nao is a twenty-something, art making (video + photo + object + painting, etc.) young woman who lives in the Yokohama area and maintains a studio (Ateliero-Eksperimentoj) with two of her friends (both musicians). I first became aware of her activities after the indefatigable Ludo Pierre (French sound & visual artist based in Tokyo) introduced me to her last year, as we were all to appear together (along with Midori and other friends) at one of his soundscreen events. Nao seems to have worked in the past with more or less ‘traditional’ mediums, but has been making a move recently to more ‘normative’ (i.e. digital) modes of expression. Personally speaking, I’ve only seen her in action in her ‘video artist/VJ mode’ at a few events in the Shibuya area. She seems to have found a comfortable niche in the international experimental arts community in Tokyo, and this due in no small part to her diverse, refreshingly sensual art.”

Do yourself a favor and check out her site for examples of her work.

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SNOW Magazine

Where's all the regular art/design-related content you used to see here? Check out SNOW Magazine, a Tokyo-based online magazine featuring news and guest columns -- see the full list of contributors -- covering the cultural landscape of Tokyo/Japan.

PauseTalk

PauseTalk is a regular series of events that take place at Cafe Pause on the first Monday of every month, with a start time of 20:00. The idea is to create a forum where Tokyo-based creatives can get together and discuss their own projects, as well as cultural currents of the city. The next edition is September 6.

PLAY is a series of events with Jean Snow spinning some of his favorite virtual discs in a casual setting at Cafe Pause. See the setlist for previous editions here, and subscribe to a feed of the mixes.
Game

Being a survey of recommended titles for your gaming pleasure. New games are added 2-3 times weekly, and all selections are by your host, Jean Snow, a Tokyo-based writer and gamer.

Jean Snow is a contributor to Arcade Mania, your guide to the arcade gaming scene in Japan (Amazon US/Amazon Japan). He also provided assistance on Tokyolife: Art and Design, a guide to Tokyo's cultural output of the past few years, covering the works of over 80 influential creatives.
He will be contributing to the upcoming fifth editions of The Rough Guide to Tokyo and The Rough Guide to Japan, due for release in 2011.
Jean Snow lives and breathes design, pop culture, and gaming in Tokyo -- sustained by an unhealthy addiction to magazines and frequent visits to his favorites cafes. He has reported on these obsessions for the following online/offline publications: Time, Inside (Australian Design Review), Gizmodo, Gridskipper, Kotaku, Tokyo Q, Superfuture, OK Fred, Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel, I.D. (International Design), Metropolis, Azure, MoCo Loco, Kateigaho International Edition, Wired's Game|Life, PingMag, CNNGo, and The Japan Times. He's also the founder and editor-in-chief of SNOW Magazine.

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this site, and also follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

Pecha Kucha Night

He's a member of the Pecha Kucha team, working on various projects, including updating Pecha Kucha Daily, a blog that highlights the creativity coming out of PKN events worldwide.

PauseTalk

He serves as editor-at-large at Néojaponisme, a web journal covering social and cultural aspects of Japan. Read the manifesto, by founder and chief editor W. David Marx.

He also writes a monthly column covering Japanese product design for The Japan Times, called "On Design." It appears on the last Thursday of every month, in both the print edition and online.

Colophon

The "Jean Snow" logo is made up of the Blackout open source typeface. The "M31" logo is by Ian Lynam, and is part of a series of 31 unique designs. The site's design is based on the Grid Focus WordPress theme by Derek Punsalan.

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