PHILADELPHIA, PA.- The Philadelphia Museum of Art is presenting works by Tokyo-based Naoto Fukasawa, one of today’s most influential designers. The exhibition celebrates Fukasawa’s career over the past 25 years.
Presenting fully-realized production designs alongside the studio’s working sketches and models for select projects, Things in Themselves offers a rare opportunity to explore both Fukasawa’s design ethos—prizing an essential “fit” between objects, users, and their environments—and his creative process. The exhibition features a thematic arrangement of works in the PMA’s collection—displayed for the first time—as well as loans from manufacturers and the influential designer’s studio. Things in Themselves touches on Fukasawa’s unique language of form and his impactful philosophies of design, known as “super normal,” “outline,” “emergence,” and “without thought,” a principle he coined to tap people’s spontaneous behaviors for design insights.
Explore Naoto Fukasawa's simple, restrained, and user-friendly products.
With an approach to functional design that prioritizes ease of use, aesthetic simplicity, and close attention to the ways mundane objects and environments record the traces of our everyday habits, Fukasawa has been an influential force in the design world since forming his eponymous studio in 2003. Best-known for his work as design director of MUJI—the Japanese “anti-brand” consumer goods company—Fukasawa has designed across a broad range of categories and media, from shaping electronics for Samsung’s global market to collaborating with artisan firms on small-batch fine furniture. Illustrating Fukasawa’s design philosophy of longevity, accessibility, and subtle humor over novelty or blatant commercialism, this exhibition explores the junctures between design, craft, and other forms of everyday art.
Things in Themselves further presents the broad geographic and cultural range of manufacturers with which Fukasawa has worked, examining his design direction for Japanese companies and his active participation in an international design community, having cultivated relationships with major American and European manufacturers such as MillerKnoll, B&B Italia, and Alessi. As a veteran educator, a co-founder of Japan’s first design museum, and director of the Mingeikan (Japan Folk Crafts Museum) in Tokyo, Fukasawa has spent his career probing the relationships between craft traditions, industrial production, and human behavior, incorporating his curatorial and pedagogical thinking into a robust design practice. Surveying his prolific career, this exhibition honors the importance of his design philosophies for the future of the field.
“Naoto is already highly respected for the subtlety and beauty of his work,” said Colin Fanning, the PMA’s Assistant Curator, European Art, “I am particularly excited for the opportunity this exhibition represents to explore his thoughtful, user-focused approach to design and his long-running emphasis on the ethical as well as the creative and economic responsibilities of industrial designers.”
“Naoto can best be described as a designer’s designer,” said Eileen Tognini, co-chair of Collab. “Both in his approach and his philosophy towards design, Naoto has had a significant impact on recent generations of designers around the world. We’re thrilled to honor him as this year’s Collab Design Excellence Award recipient.”
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