Tokyo Designers Week Art Galleries

Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, 2011

As part of the Tokyo Designers Week 2011, FBA designed the exhibition spaces for Mizuma Art Gallery and Tomio Koyama Gallery, two of Tokyo’s most renown art galleries.
With close to 1,600 m2 of exhibition space, FBA had allocated about a tenth of the Tokyo Designers Week 2011 to the arts.
Behind G Tokyo, ten booths representing some of Tokyo’s many small galleries, Mizuma Art Gallery and Tomio Koyama Gallery, were the climax of the 190-metre-long tent.

ELPIS — Sky of Hope (Mizuma Art Gallery)

Just as ancient Greece saw Elpis, the personification of Hope, always in correlation with suffering, Mizuma Art Gallery’s curation was a direct response to the catastrophic events which had devastated large parts of Japan on March 11 that year.
The selected works shared the sense of uncertainty that was still part of everyday life eight months after the disaster.
FBA designed a space whose only purpose was to intensify the art works. As if the order of the white cube’s rectangle had broken up, four L-shaped walls divided the 14 by 24 metre space into an uncanny enfilade. Moving through seemingly displaced spatial fragments, a feeling of claustrophic awe intensifies, culminating, before one is released again, in Aiko Miyanaga’s and Koji Tanada’s hints at hope.

Local Realities: From Oneself (Tomio Koyama Gallery)

The design for Tomio Koyama Gallery’s exhibition dissolves the conventional order in an entirely different way: There is no sequence, no one route. All seems present at once, a panorama of art separated by different depths.
As we move through the space, the perception of these depths changes, different relations between the art works keep being created anew.