Tokyolife: Art and Design

Your Guide to Design and Pop Culture in Tokyo

May 28, 2008

Tokyolife: Art and Design

I’ve very happy to announce that today marks the official release of TOKYOLIFE: ART AND DESIGN, a beautiful new tome from Rizzoli that covers Tokyo’s creative output of the past few years. I have the great pleasure of getting a project coordination credit in the book, and hope that you get a chance to have a look or even pick it up.

The main contributors to the book are Ian Luna (author and editor of many books on architecture and design), Lauren A. Gould (art director and writer, currently working on a Bape monograph), Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp (co-editors of Japanese film site Midnight Eye), and David G. Imber and Mika Yoshida (writers for BRUTUS and CASA BRUTUS, and other magazines). The cover is by Chip Kidd, quite possibly my favorite book design (and if you haven’t, you really need to pick up CHIP KIDD: BOOK ONE).

Below, the official description for the book:

Tokyolife is is a lavish, whip-smart insiderâ€™s guide to the last few years of cultural production in one of the worldâ€™s great centers of creativity, and is organized around the physical city, and the role of the megalopolis itself as both the site and inspiration for an unprecedented explosion in design and the visual arts.

Tokyo and its avant-garde occupy a disproportionate role in the creation of global culture. Represented in this book is the work of over eighty creativesâ€”painters, architects, interior designers, industrial designers, fashion designers, filmmakers and photographers, many highly influential, and some as yet unknown in the West. Announcing a generational transition, the divergent personalities profiled in the book have collectively engineered entirely new ways of seeing, expanding their influence well beyond Japan and into the arts of Asia, Western Europe, and North America.

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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 March 5.

We hereby define a new term, that of the magaziner, described as a person who exerts an unhealthy amount of love for all things magazine. The Magaziner is a site that mostly focuses on the intersection between magazines and the digital frontier, and what it means for the medium. This does not preclude the inclusion of a healthy amount of print love.

Codex is a weekly music podcast hosted by Jean Snow, recorded in Tokyo. Playlists for all episodes are posted on the site, and you can subscribe to RSS feeds of posts and episodes.

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.

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Jean Snow is Executive Director of the PechaKucha organization. He also helps run the PechaKucha Night in Tokyo -- please get in touch if you are interested in presenting at a future event. For a more intimate salon-like discussion group, join him at his monthly PauseTalk event.

A longtime resident of Tokyo, he lives and breathes design, pop culture, and gaming, sustained by an unhealthy addiction to magazines and frequent visits to his favorites cafes. He has reported on these obsessions for various online/offline publications, including the following: Time, Inside (Australian Design Review), Gizmodo, Gridskipper, Kotaku, 1UP, 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, Phaidon, and The Japan Times.

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this site, and also follow him on Twitter and Facebook, or get in touch by email.

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 Tuesday of every month, in both the print edition and online.

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The "Jean Snow" logo is written using the free Kirimomi Swash 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.