SPIRAL Press Release 2014.11

A fusion of art and fashion from Finland and Japan “Boutique! Thinking about fashion, through art”

Artists

From Finland: Tero Puha & Teemu Muurimäki / Salla Salin & Timo Rissanen / Heidi Lunabba & Nutty Tarts/ Katja Tukiainen & Samu-Jussi Koski / Minna Parikka & Jani Leinonen / Paola Suhonen & Mikko Ijäs From Japan: Erina Matsui & Noritaka Tatehana / matohu & Kenmei Nagaoka Evolving out of “Boutique Where Art Meets Fashion,” the exhibition held in 2012 at Finland’s Amos Anderson Art Museum themed around the fusion of fashion and art, Spiral will create a new version in Tokyo, “Boutique! Thinking about fashion, through art,” from December 17th (Wed) to December 29th (Mon).

■Press Inquiries: Eri Takimoto (Ms.) Spiral/Wacoal Art Center 5-6-23 Minami-Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-0062 Tel: 03-3498-5605 Fax: 03-3498-7848 E-mail: press@spiral.co.jp http://www.spiral.co.jp/

Exhibition

Period: December 17th to December 29th, 2014 Venue: Spiral Garden (Spiral 1F)

Boutique! Thinking about fashion, through art

Top left: ”Body Beautiful (Remix)” Tero Puha & Teemu Muurimäki Top right: ”15%” Salla Salin & Timo Rissanen Bottom right

Erina Matsui（example artwork） Photo:Keizo Kioku Courtesy of YAMAMOTO GENDAI Bottom right: “Cinderella, 2014” Noritaka Tatehana

SPIRAL Press Release 2014.11

Highlights

Models strutting elegantly down the runway to meet a wall of cameras flashes. Bright talents working at the cutting-edge of their field. Such glittering scenes invariably evoke the fashion world, whose rich creations stimulate the hopes and aspirations of so many as both wearable artworks and forms of self-expression. On the other hand, fashion also throws up questions of the environmental effects of mass production and consumption, as well as exaggerated ideals of “beauty.” This exhibition pairs fashion designers with artists, highlighting both the allure of fashion as well as contemporary art’s commitment to engaging with social issues. Through the filters of fashion design, the exhibits will confront problems in society and express fashion not merely as something manifesting vogues, but as materials for grappling with dilemmas. Isolating contradictory but shared elements of function vs. decoration, expression vs. convention, price vs. value, the exhibition space will be divided into several scenes: A factory, a fitting room, and a press preview event. Spiral looks forward to welcoming visitors to this exhibition featuring a unique world jointly created by designers and artists from Finland and Japan.

◆ Thinking about social problems from the perspective of fashion The exhibits are not simply “clothes,” but artworks inspired by fashion and how fashion functions in society. The exhibits will get visitors thinking about such issues as mass consumption in a global economy, sustainability, gender, aesthetics, class disparity, and more.

◆ Collaboration The works are collaborations between the fashion and art worlds, from both Japan and Finland. Out of this unusual encounter between two cultures, issues will emerge that are both similar and different. The designer-artist pairs also share creative processes and from here will discover new artistic possibilities.

◆ Next-generation talent Participating designers and artists are emerging talents in their thirties, representing the next generation of leaders in their fields.

◆ Diverse media: Painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and more The exhibits include participatory installations and performances, offering experiences stimulating all five senses in order to encourage playful but deep consideration of the themes.

◆ Visual design by Kigi Design unit Kigi (Ryosuke Uehara, Yoshie Watanabe) has recently been drawing attention for its art direction across a wide range of fields, including for corporations, stores and brands such as D-BROS. Kigi will create the visual design for the exhibition, as well as the winter decorations that will seasonally transform the entrance to Spiral at the same time as the exhibition period.

SPIRAL Press Release 2014.11

Boutique! Thinking about fashion, through art

Katja Tukiainen & Samu-Jussi Koski “Girl Evacuees”

Exhibits (partial list)

Samu-Jussi Koski is a former designer for Marimekko, while Katja Tukiainen is a prolific painter and cartoonist. This joint work focuses on refugees from Karelia, the region divided between Finland and Russian in 1918, and occupied by Russia during the Second World War. When the Soviets invaded Finnish Karelia, refugees had to flee their homeland carrying only their most important possessions. It is said that people put on their best clothes and married women wore dresses during their escape. The dress Samu-Jussi Koski designed for the work is based on the story of his grandmother and old photographs of the dresses worn by Karelian women, to which he has added new interpretations and contemporary touches. These dresses are displayed on mannequins that are sculptures of female characters created by Katja Tukiainen. These girls have been kicked out of the fictional country of “Shangri Laa Laa Land” due to Greed and Intolerance. Looking at these girl evacuees in their beautiful dresses, the viewer sees how no matter what happens, their courage, wisdom and joy cannot be taken away from them.

“Girl Evacuees” Photo: Kari Siltala

Exhibition

Period: December 17th (Wed) to December 29th (Mon), 2014 Open every day 11:00-20:00 Venue: Spiral Garden (Spiral 1F) 5-6-23 Minami-Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-0062 Exits B1, B3 of Tokyo Metro Omotesando Station (Ginza, Chiyoda, Hanzomon Lines)

Admission: Free Inquiries: Tel 03-3498-1171 Organised by Wacoal Art Center Planned by Spiral Planning in cooperation with Annamari Vänskä Special cooperation from The Finnish Institute in Japan In cooperation with Amos Anderson Art Museum Supported by the Embassy of Finland Graphic Design: Kigi Space designed by Yukiharu Takematsu + E. P. A

SPIRAL Press Release 2014.11

Tero Puha & Teemu Muurimäki “Body Beautiful (Remix)”

Salla Salin & Timo Rissanen “15%”

Nutty Tarts & Heidi Lunabba “Cultural Dresscode”

Fashion designer Timo Rissanen and visual artist Salla Salin focus on one of the most pressing issues today, mass consumer culture. Fashion, by its nature, depends on seasonal trends that rapidly change, while clothes are consumed almost like daily items that we use and then throw away. Salin and Rissanen’s “15%” is an installation with a title referring to the average percentage of fabric waste produced in the industrial process of making garments. The artwork presents both the 85% (sewn into one of the most common and often inexpensive garments in the world: a white cotton t-shirt) and the remaining “15%” (the waste). The consumer is made aware of his/her duty to consume responsibly. How can we make fashion more sustainable? How is the ideology of clothing related to luxury? And how can we construct a clothing manufacturing process that does not deplete people and the environment? “15%” poses these kinds of questions about the legitimacy of values in the global market economy.

Visual artist Tero Puha and fashion designer Teemu Muurimäki deal with crucial issues in fashion, such as the body, gender, sexuality, and ideals of beauty. Fashion physically creates idealistic differences in gender, as well as empty promises. Puha and Muurimäki take a critical view of these ideals through the medium of advertising. They developed a luxury perfume called “Body Beautiful (Remix),” using the “product” as a way to explores ideas about branding, asking how our ideals of beauty are created and how the criteria for them can be remade, as well as inviting viewers to consider how visual imagery is used to make a product seem more appealing.

“Body Beautiful (Remix)” Photo: Tero Puha

“15%”

This is a collaborative work by artist Heidi Lunabba and art duo Nutty Tarts. We spontaneously read interpretations about social class into the clothes that people wear. Is your identity created by the group to which you belong? This work searches for the correlation between hierarchy and visual identity. Visitors enter the fitting-room installation and experience the responses of the participants in the experiment by controlling the photographs and video. A special new Tokyo version of the work is planned for the Spiral exhibition.

“Cultural Dresscode”

SPIRAL Press Release 2014.11

Erina Matsui & Noritaka Tatehana

matohu & Kenmei Nagaoka

This partnership pairs matohu, the fashion brand known for apparel design harnessing a contemporary Japanese aesthetic, with Kenmei Nagaoka, who created the long design life select shop D&DEPARTMENT. While their media differ, the two share a determination to make things that can be valued for longer by their inherent qualities, rather than superficial decoration or glamor. For this exhibition they will create work on the theme of drifting times, placing new values on things that have been forgotten. Their contribution will make visitors consider anew the relationship between the abundance of clothes and things in our society, while also focusing on Japan’s unique culture. matohu Fashion brand established in 2005 by Hiroyuki Horihata and Makiko Sekiguchi. Its designs, infused throughout with a sense of Japanese aesthetics, have been exhibited at Tokyo Collection, Spiral Garden, and 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. In 2009, the brand won the Mainichi Fashion Grand Prix New Designer Award and Shiseido Sponsorship Award. Kenmei Nagaoka Born in Hokkaido in 1965. After working for the Hara Design Institute at Nippon Design Center, he founded the studio drawing and manual. In 2000, he started D&DEPARTMENT PROJECT in the Tokyo district of Setagaya, fusing design and recycling, and working to create more sustainable design consumption. He founded the bimonthly magazine d long life design in 2005, followed in 2009 by d design travel, a guidebook about Japan from the perspective of design.

Top: Erina Matsui, “Je t’aime, so much that flowers come out of my throat…” (example artwork). Photo: Keizo Kioku. Courtesy of YAMAMOTO GENDAI Left: “Cinderella, 2014” Noritaka Tatehana

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The young painter Erina Matsui is known for her screen-like artworks featuring her own face. Designer Noritaka Tatehana, meanwhile, has created shoes beloved by the likes of Lady Gaga. Matsui says that people are judged by their clothing once they become adults. For her, and for many women, “clothes” are items for transforming yourself into a different character. Matsui and Tatehana will collaborate on an exhibit inspired by the fairy tale “Cinderella,” a story that directly shows the connection between class and clothing. The artwork will encourage visitors to consider the potential for the things we wear to “act” for us, and to ask ourselves what true happiness really is.

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Erina Matsui Born in 1984. Artist. She obtained a Master's degree in Fine Arts from Tokyo University of the Arts and is currently a part-time instructor at Kyoto Seika University. In 2004, she won the Gold Prize at GEISAI #6 for her self-portrait. In 2012, she was awarded a one-year fellowship under the Japan Government Overseas Study Programme.

Noritaka Tatehana Born in 1985 into a household working in Tokyo nightlife districts. At Tokyo University of the Arts he majored in dyeing and created designs using yuzen dye with kimono and geta (traditional Japanese shoes). He has received acclaim not only in the fashion scene but also the art world for his shoe collections whose designs are completed entirely by hand. He established his own eponymous fashion brand in 2010.