[1] is a Japanese graphic designer and researcher in Asian iconography.[2]
Throughout his career, Sugiura has been a pioneer within the design world using processes that enables the visualization of consciousness in his large body of work that ranges from record jackets and posters, to books, magazines, and exhibition catalogues, to diagrams, stamps, and more. He is also active in promoting the study of traditional Asian cultures through producing innovative catalogue designs and organizing exhibitions such as Mandala: now you see it, now you don't (1980) and Flower Cosmology: Traditions in Dyeing, Weaving, and Ornaments (1992), underscored by his prolific research on cosmologies and mandalas.
Sugiura served as a visiting professor for the Ulm School of Design in Germany (1964-1967); professor at Kobe Design University (1987-2002); and is currently the director of the Asian Design Institute at Kobe Design University (from April 2010).[3] He has received numerous awards including the Mainichi Industrial Award (1962), Mainichi Art Award (1997); Purple Ribbon (1997); Leipzig Book Design Competition Special Honor Award; Design Special Achievement Award by the Hong Kong Design Award Asia (2014); Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays (2019).[4]
Sugiura studied architecture at the Tokyo National University of the Arts. He developed an interest in design as a university student and after graduating in 1955, he worked under the designer Ryuichi Yamashiro at Takashimaya Department Store's advertising department for six months.[5] The following year, Sugiura received the prestigious Nisshenbi (日宣美, JAAC) Award for his jacket design for of the record LP JACKET and began to garner attention in the graphic design world as a rising talent with an atypical architecture background.[6]
From a young age, Sugiura loved music and was knowledgeable in folk music and contemporary music.[7] Early in his career, Sugiura took on various music related design jobs, such as the newly founded Sogetsu Art Center. For Sogetsu, he worked with other notable designers Tadanori Yokoo, Kiyoshi Awazu, and Makoto Wada to create materials promoting music related events for contemporary artists and musicians including John Cage and David Tudor.[8]
Sugiura began his career in the late 1950s when advertising dominated the majority of design work, as was suggested by the term “commercial design” (商業デザイン) having come into conventional use. In response, Sugiura, along with a bourgeoning generation of artists in their late 20s, sought to devise a mode of visual design that took inspiration from a wide frame of references, including science, philosophy, and religion, as well as other artistic mediums.
Suigura took on a leadership role for this group of young designers, bringing Japan’s existing design climate into a modern era. Some of his best examples include his numerous book designs as well as his inventive diagrams (also known as infographics), such as his series of Time Distance Maps. His work on "maps" served as an important step in establishing diagrams and infographics as part of visual communication and design in Japan.
Over the course of his career, Sugiura has worked as a designer on nearly 40 different magazines,[9] ranging from academic periodicals to novel cultural publications and some with run times as long as two or three decades.
When Sugiura moved to freelance work in the late 1950s, most magazines and particularly academic magazines, were designed by editors who often had little design experience.[10] Sugiura was among the first to introduce an artistic yet methodical approach to the field of academic magazine design. His designs from this period are characterized by his process of first determining an origin pattern and reworking the pattern in various orientations and color arrangements. He described this method as jikozōshoku dezain (自己増殖デザイン; self-proliferation design).[11] As these types of magazines often had a limited design budget, Sugiura's method saved costs by repurposing printing plates which would typically be discarded or retired after the original design had been printed.
Sugiura attributes the realization of self-proliferation design to his work on one of his earliest magazines, Ongaku geijutsu (音楽芸術, "art of music") (1960-1963), the only Japanese magazine at the time that was dedicated to academic research on contemporary music.[12] For the cover, he created an original pattern based on the sequence of Olivier Messiaen's mode de valuers et d’intensités and micro sequences from the twelve-tone technique of musical composition. Over the next two years, subsequent covers were derivatives of the same pattern, composed through slight deviations in the sequences combined with variations in the colors and number of colors. Magazines Kōhoku (広告, "advertising") (1960); Kōgei nyūsu (工芸ニュース, "industrial art news"), Sūgaku seminā (数学セミナー, "mathematics semina")（第１期）1962-1970, and Shin Nhon bungaku (新日本文学, "new Japanese literature") (1964-1966) also featured covers conceived through the mechanics of self-proliferation design.
Using the self-proliferation method, Sugiura also realized a series of “vibrating” designs that he would incorporate into music-based projects, including the record jacket of Experimental Music of Japan '69 (日本の電子音楽 '69 "electronic music of Japan '69") and Masakazu Nakai zenshū (中井正一全集) (1981).[13] These designs also originated from his cover work for Ongaku geijutsu, in 1963, when Sugiura replaced the original pattern with one that was formed primarily through concentric circles. Through the overlaying, crossing, and cropping of concentric circles and other geometric shapes, Sugiura felt he had developed a design that could capture a sense of movement or rhythm and act as a visual embodiment of acoustics and noise.[14]
After teaching at the Ulm School of Design, Sugiura's design philosophy underwent a significant shift, inspired by the consciousness of civil society within German design practices and the role of design as method of visual communication.[15] For his magazine covers, Sugiura moved away from purely decorative patterns and towards a more content focused approach wherein he would form a unique “face” and visual identity for the magazine.[16]
In the case of architectural magazines such as SD (1966-1968) and the Toshi-Jutaku (都会住宅, "the monthly journal of urban housing") (1968-1970), Sugiura opted for covers that were unprecedentedly text heavy in an attempt to appeal to the reader-base of architects (whom he felt were more concerned with verbal and textual expression/communication versus visual).[17] While most architecture magazine covers at the time featured a single enlarged photograph, Sugiura opted for dense and compositionally complex covers because he felt the simplicity of a single image could not properly convey the multiplicity of thoughts present in postmodern urban society.[18]
Sugiura also began experimenting with novel designs that featured uncommon text orientations and printing materials. For the philosophy magazine Paideia (パイデイア) (1969-1972), he formulated his own design grid that is based on 8 point type, making it one of the first twentieth-century Japanese magazines to forgo the Japanese metric system or shakkanhō.[19] Sugiura also chose unconventional paper colors, such as green and light purple, and ink colors for the text. For the magazine Asian Culture (1972-1987), later renamed to APC (Asian Pacific Culture) (1988-1995), he refrained from using any white or black paper, and instead chose to print onto bright craft paper with vividly colored inks to create an electric duo-chrome style that would convey the vitality he saw in Asian culture.[20] Sugiura's longest running involvement with a single publication, Ginka (季刊銀花, "quarterly silver flower") (1970-2010) underwent a new design schemata every year based on a unique theme. With Ginka, Sugiura played with a dynamic and constantly changing arrangement of text and images, numerous type faces, and hand drawn calligraphy. One of the most well known themes from Ginka was in the year 1983 for which all the layouts were angled in line with the tilt of the Earth's axis.[21]
Sugiura's dedication to explorative design is also evidenced in the experimental and cross-disciplinary publications Uwasa no Shinsō (噂の眞相, "truth of rumor") (1980-2004) and Yu (遊, "play") (1971-1979). Uwasa no Shinsō, a unique magazine that investigated various contemporary and historical rumors, underwent a design change every three issues. Sugiura selected new artists every year and assigned them a theme, similar to Ginka — however the constant stylistic evolution of Uwasa no Shinsō was an intentional choice to emulate the temporality and elusiveness of rumors.[22] On the covers, images and text were often overlapped and partially covering one another, thereby creating a sense of movement and secrecy that spoke to the nature of rumors. Yu, a self-proclaimed “anti-literature/ non literature” magazine that paired the work of scientists and artists, took on a design style that echoed the content's radical sense of play. Sugiura explorations with Yu included dizzying spreads with text blocks that intersected each other from various angles (1975, V. 8), combined faces of the couples featured in the magazine (1976, V. 9), and issue titles printed on the spine made from the initials of the people within the magazine (1976, V. 10).
Sugiura's venture into book design began in the early 1960s when he was brought on as a designer for Document 1961, a book published by Japan Council against A & H Bombs, which included photographs of Ken Domon and Shōmei Tōmatsu. His involvement in photobooks grew significantly from the late 1960s to 1980s, during which Sugiura worked with famed photographers based both in and outside of Japan, including Eikoh Hosoe, Ikko Nakahara, Yutaka Takanashi, and Robert Frank. At a time when photobooks were generally regarded as a reproduction of original images, Sugiura’s approach to book design was notable in that the photobook itself was meant to be considered its own original work.[23] Through the medium of a book with its own unique materials, printing techniques, methods of physical engagement, and three dimensionality, Sugiura sought out a sense of materiality and active viewing experience that operated as a separate entity from stand alone photography prints.
Sugiura’s design for Kikuji Kawada’s The Map (地図) (1965) propelled his reputation as a formidable book designer among Japanese art critics and continues to be regarded as a seminal work in the history of photobooks.[24] Given that Kawada photographs include images of the war’s aftermath and shadow like imprints burned into the walls of the Atomic Bomb Dome, Sugiura wanted to design a book that would necessitate longer and more intimate interactions with the book.[25] The Map features a book of Kawada’s work, a brown insert of text by Kenzaburo Ōe, and a two part slipcase. When the exterior part of the slipcase is removed, the interior part encases the book with 2 sets of doors (a panel on each edge of the book). When all four panels, the reader can see have words, related to images’ content, printed in a list wrapping around the circumference of the book — though the orientation of the text would require one to rotate the entire case in order to read it. Within the photobook, each page is folded so that a single spread contains outer image and hidden inner images, once again requiring greater physically engagement than a standard book. Sugiura joined the folded pages through an uncommon binding process that relied solely on glue.
Sugiura's play with the notion of materiality is seen in other photobooks like Yutaka Takanashi's To the City (都市へ) (1974) for which a large moon-like aluminum circle is placed on top of the front cover but also extends to books in other genres including the artist monograph Tetsumi Kudo (1969), in which small scale figurines created by the artist are set within enclaves carved into the pages. Sugiura's emphasis of the medium's three dimensionality is evidenced further in his detailed utilization of every available surface within a book. In his all black book depicting the cosmos, Summa Cosmographica (1979), an image of either the Andromeda Galaxy or Flamsteed's chart of the constellations is revealed on trim edge depending on the tilt of the pages.[26] For the design of Tough Woman Like a Spinning Top (ぶっちんごまの女) (1985), a book about the Meiji courtesan grandmother of the author and painter Shinichi Saitō, features a landscape painting of the red light district Yoshiwara that wraps around from the front end sheets, across the fore edge, and ending at the back end sheets. In the case of multivolume collections, such as the writings of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (ライプニッツ著作集) (Kōsakusha, 1988–1999) or Louis-Ferdinand Céline (セリーヌの作品集) (Kokusho Kankōkai, 1978–2003), multiple images are printed on the spines so that the combined display of all the volumes doubles as a visual showcase of the writers.
Sugiura's consciousness of Asia began as a child with his attraction to Asian folk music and grew during a his time teaching at Ulm, where he acquired a new found self-awareness about Asian identity.[27] However, Sugiura's preoccupation with the question of defining Asian design and iconography was informed by his trip to India in 1971 when he was sent under UNESCO Development Program in order to survey the state of Indian printing and create seminars on printing development in the country.[28] Sugiura then began producing and compiling research on ancient Asian cosmologies, calligraphic traditions, iconography, and general culture that spanned across the multiple countries within the Asian continent. The regional breadth of his research interests speak to one of the core tenets of his theories — many of the multilayered symbols and iconography of various Asian countries have shared origins that are independent from Western traditions.[29] Through the Asian Cultural Centre for UNESCO, Sugiura has published his research in the periodicals Asian Culture and APC. He has also created award-winning luxurious book sets that evidence his deep understanding of these cosmologies, such as The Mandalas of the Two Worlds (伝真言院両界曼荼羅) (1977) and Tibetan Mandalas - The Ngor Collection (西蔵曼荼羅集成：チベット・マンダラ) (1983). In addition to his leadership of the Asian Design Institute, Sugiura continues to promote the study of Asian design through lectures, academic publications, and exhibitions.[30]
Kōhei Sugiura Design Archive (Japanese)― A large visual library of Sugiura's publication designs and design methodology, presented by the Musashino Art University Museum & Library. This archive also features an exhaustive list of projects and achievements.
Braxton, Mycah. "Interview with Sugiura Kōhei (2003)." Review of Japanese Culture and Society, Volume 29, 2017.
Link to Asian Design Institute's activity.