In this Book
- Critical design in Japan: Material culture, luxury, and the avant-garde
- Book
- 2020
- Published by: Manchester University Press

summary
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.
Table of Contents

- List of figures
- pp. viii-x
- Preface and acknowledgements
- pp. xi-xiv
- Introduction
- pp. 1-30
- Mujirushi Ryohin and the absence of style
- pp. 124-150
- Hironen and the representation of the other
- pp. 151-183
- Bibliography
- pp. 214-225
Additional Information
ISBN
9781526139986
Related ISBN(s)
9781526139979, 9781526140012
MARC Record
OCLC
1150101754
Pages
248
Launched on MUSE
2020-04-13
Language
English
Open Access
No