Kiyoshi Awazu
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.
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.
[5]: 33–34 From 1954 to 1958, Awazu worked in the publicity department at film production company Nikkatsu, creating silkscreened prints that primarily featured simple line drawings alongside hand-lettered titles.
[7]: 138–139 In 1955, after visiting Kujūkuri Beach in Chiba prefecture and witnessing the indignation of local fishermen in the area, who had been banned from conducting their activities by American Occupation forces, Awazu was inspired by their plight to create a protest poster entitled Umi o kaese [Give Back Our Oceans] in solidarity with their resistance efforts.
The poster received the grand prize at the Nissenbi Exhibition organized by the Japan Advertising Artists' Club, bringing Awazu public recognition and catalyzing his graphic design career.
Resisting the formal conventions of mid-century modernism, Awazu instead opted for more expressive, variable forms that made use of sketches, ideograms, motifs culled from folklore and mythology, and adopted a vibrant pop color palette that would soon become synonymous with his style.
Many of his works harken to the graphic linearity and expressive faces and textiles found in Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock printing, while subverting their contexts and colors to evoke contemporary pop sensibilities.
Though best known for his psychedelic, symbol-laden assemblages that make use of vivid colors and crisp, expressive contours, Awazu was not restricted to a single style and often employed varied methods and techniques to create works that could be radically minimal in form, or used more painterly strokes and monochromatic palettes.
Understanding his practice as one of reprinting and reproducing in order to assert meanings and ideas, Awazu often made use of recurring motifs such as Sada Abe, turtles, and fingerprints in altered forms and famously proclaimed, "take the path of duplication!"
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.
[7]: 94–96 Rendered in austere, almost childlike linear drawings and paired with sparse, poetic fragments of dialogue, the comic reveals the breadth of Awazu's conceptual practice and his preoccupation was fundamental questions regarding humanity and the expressive capacities of line and text across narrative formats.
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.
[2]: 8 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.
[11]: 79 Awazu was also active as an spatial designer, and created the venue for the exhibition “The Future: World of Progress," located within the central "Symbol Zone" of Expo '70 in Osaka, as well as an immersive, multi-projection work entitled Mandara-rama that was installed in the presentation space.
In 1970, he collaborated with architect Minoru Takeyama to produce a set of brightly colored supergraphics and geometric patterns that covered the entire exterior of the Nibankan Building in Kabukicho.
Created using inexpensive paints, the concept for the design was to have the murals replaced every five years with a new set of patterns, harkening to the endlessly mutating, anti-historical quality of the red light district.
[9] In 2023, Awazu's studio in Kawasaki, designed in 1972 by architect Hiroshi Hara, was renovated and opened to the public as an exhibition space aimed at highlighting the work of up-and-coming artists.
