Kiyoshi Awazu

Kiyoshi Awazu (, February 19, 1929 – April 28, 2009) was a Japanese graphic designer, active in the post-WWII era in the fields of poster design, architecture design, set design, filmmaking, and illustration. A self-taught artist, Awazu possessed an eclectic and variegated graphic style that employed vibrant color palettes, appropriated and subverted motifs from both traditional Japanese art and design as well as contemporary pop culture, and incorporated supergraphics and expressive typography across a range of scales and spatial contexts.

Believing that design was a basic function of human life, and that it was the social role of the designer "to extend the rural into the city, foreground the folklore, reawaken the past, summon back the outdated," Awazu worked with collaborators across genres and culled references from a vast array of sources to produce works that were intensely transdisciplinary and expressive, all while resisting the essentializing and universalizing tendencies of the modernist tradition. Beginning with his award-winning 1955 poster Umi o kaese [Give Back Our Oceans], an expression of solidarity with disenfranchised fishermen who were banned from conducting their activities by American Occupation forces, Awazu's work also displays a keen engagement with political activism and an emphasis on the capacity of visual communications to reveal injustices and expand awareness through affective means. Awazu worked with diverse collaborators across the fields of film, performance, and the visual arts to produce promotional posters, book designs, illustrations, and other graphic materials.

Awazu also worked with numerous modern architects—notably as a member of the Metabolism movement—to integrate structural design with other applied arts and foreground the role of design as a conduit for promoting civic engagement in urban contexts.

Biography

Early life Kiyoshi Awazu was born in 1929 in Himonya, Meguro ward. Awazu's father, an electrical lab technician in the Ministry of Communications, died in a train accident at the age of thirty, while the younger Awazu was still an infant. During these studies, Awazu encountered the work of American artist Ben Shahn, best known for his social realist approach and expressive, graphic style, and Austrian-American graphic designer Herbert Bayer, who was trained at the Bauhaus and became a pioneering figure in modern typography. In 1954, Awazu joined the Independent Film Promotion Society, an interest group engaged in film poster design.

Awazu’s early drawings and paintings harken to the work of the Japanese Reportage artists and 19th-century French Realism painters, using muted earth tones and thick, painterly strokes to depict anonymized laborers and pedestrians against industrializing landscapes that also bore the presence of the American occupation. Awazu's melancholic scenes reflect his status as part of a generation of artists who witnessed and came of age in World War II and its aftermath, as well as his involvement in left-wing politics.

In 1984, Awazu was commissioned by the Japan Graphic Designers Association (JAGDA) to create the second poster for the annual Hiroshima Appeals series (launched the year prior by Yusaku Kamekura's Burning Butterflies design). Awazu's design, titled A Diversity of Birds, featured a densely packed canvas of seventeen birds of varying types, colors, and ages, rendered with textured strokes reminiscent of the quality of pastel crayons. Awazu sought to emphasize the birds' "human qualities" and represented them "with eyes wide open and mouths agape as if clamoring to communicate something," alluding to the collective spirit that fueled these calls for peace.

Illustration and book design

Awazu was a prolific book designer and illustrator, and by 1978 had produced designs for over 500 volumes. He referred to book design as the "origin of design," and the "god of all design."

Awazu also worked with Kо̄hei Sugiura to design Hiroshima-Nagasaki Document 61 (1962), a photobook of works by Ken Domon and Shо̄mei Tо̄matsu. The first of these publications, Remi is Alive (Remi wa ikiteiru), an autobiographical children's book written by Imao Hirano about the author's struggles growing up as the son of an American father and Japanese mother, was published in 1958. These ideas were made manifest through group exhibitions such as From Space to Environment in 1966, as well as collaborative design projects. Awazu too was deeply engaged with interdisciplinary projects throughout his career, and was particularly involved with the Metabolism group during the late 1950s and 1960s, who put forth theories of urban growth through the prism of biological metaphors. thumb Nibankan, Kabukichō, Tokyo. Architectural design by Minoru Takeyama, exterior graphics by Kiyoshi Awazu.Awazu designed key elements of the group's graphic identity, such as the logo and opening pages for each chapter of the group's manifesto booklet METABOLISM 1960, and also designed books by several of the members, including Kawazoe Noboru’s Contemporary Japanese Architecture (1973) and Kisho Kurokawa's The Work of Kisho Kurokawa: Capsule, Spaceframe, Metabolism, Metamorphose (1970), which featured vibrant assemblages of the architect's structural innovations, surrealist motifs, and expressive typography to illustrate the dynamism of the architect's multimodal vision and imagination. The building was famously featured on the cover of Charles Jencks' 1977 publication The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. Awazu was also a prolific writer and theorist of graphic design, and published widely on topics regarding the social role and functions of design, the relationships between design and allied disciplines, as well as personal reflections on his design education and influences. Notable publications include What Can Design Do (Dezain ni nani ga dekiru ka) (1969) and A Song in Praise of Gaudi (Gaudi Sanka) (1981), an extensive study of the work of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí.