Critical Design in Japan: Material Culture, Luxury, and the Avant-Garde

By Ory Bartal

This book tells the story of critical avant-garde design in Japan, which emerged during the 1960s and continues to inspire designers today. The practice communicates a form of visual and material protest drawing on the ideologies and critical theories of the 1960s and 1970s, notably feminism, body politics, the politics of identity, and ecological, anti-consumerist and anti-institutional critiques, as well as the concept of otherness. It also presents an encounter between two seemingly contradictory concepts: luxury and the avant-garde. The book challenges the definition of design as the production of unnecessary decorative and conceptual objects, and the characterisation of Japanese design in particular as beautiful, sublime or a product of 'Japanese culture'. In doing so it reveals the ways in which material and visual culture serve to voice protest and formulate a social critique.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1526139979
• ISBN13: 9781526139979
• Release Date: July 2020
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.9" x 9.5"