Kiyoshi Awazu
Kiyoshi Awazu was a Japanese graphic designer, active in the post-WWII era in the fields of poster design, architecture design, set design, filmmaking, and illustration. 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.
Believing that design was a basic function of human life, and that it was the social role of the designer "to extend the rural into the city, foreground the folklore, reawaken the past, summon back the outdated," Awazu worked with collaborators across genres and culled references from a vast array of sources to produce works that were intensely transdisciplinary and expressive, all while resisting the essentializing and universalizing tendencies of the modernist tradition. Beginning with his award-winning 1955 poster Umi o kaese , an expression of solidarity with disenfranchised fishermen who were banned from conducting their activities by American Occupation forces, Awazu's work also displays a keen engagement with political activism and an emphasis on the capacity of visual communications to reveal injustices and expand awareness through affective means. 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.
Awazu also worked with numerous modern architects—notably as a member of the Metabolism movement—to integrate structural design with other applied arts and foreground the role of design as a conduit for promoting civic engagement in urban contexts. Within the field of architecture, he is best known for producing the bold supergraphics on the exterior of the Nibankan building, which was famously featured on the cover of Charles Jencks' The Language of Modern Architecture.
Biography
Early life
Kiyoshi Awazu was born in 1929 in Himonya, Meguro ward. Awazu's father, an electrical lab technician in the Ministry of Communications, died in a train accident at the age of thirty, while the younger Awazu was still an infant. At the age of four, Awazu's mother remarried to a dressmaker and he was sent to live with his grandmother and uncle nearby. After graduating from elementary school, he attended a trade school at night while working different jobs, including at a rotary print press factory, a construction materials production company, and at a used book store in Kanda, where he began to delve deeply into poetry and literature.Though Awazu entered the commerce department at Hosei University, classes were largely cancelled owing to the war, and his home was burned down in the bombing of Tokyo. After the surrender, Awazu dropped out of school and opted to become a subway employee at Meguro Station while becoming involved in a “Social Studies Study Group” near Hosei University, where he began to become involved in studies of Marxism-Leninism. In 1948, he quit his subway position and began working for the Japan Graphic Arts Association, a billboard and film pamphlet production agency while attending sketching classes at a small art studio in Ginza.
Awazu was a largely self-taught artist and credited his artistic education to reading numerous prewar art historical textbooks and journals and foreign graphic design magazines. During these studies, Awazu encountered the work of American artist Ben Shahn, best known for his social realist approach and expressive, graphic style, and Austrian-American graphic designer Herbert Bayer, who was trained at the Bauhaus and became a pioneering figure in modern typography. Shahn’s artistic engagements with political and social realities, as well as the lives of ordinary people, along with Bayer’s innovative use of photomontage and expressive handling of text as a graphic medium would serve as important influences on Awazu’s artistic development and his thinkings on the social role of design and visual communication in the modern world. Awazu's early works, which make use of strong, jagged lines, simplified forms, allegorical motifs, and focus on the expressive potentials of the human form bear strong traces of Shahn's artistic and political influences.
''Umi o kaese'' and Career beginnings
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. In 1954, Awazu joined the Independent Film Promotion Society, an interest group engaged in film poster design.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 in solidarity with their resistance efforts. The poster depicts a discontented fisherman, clad in a patchwork jacket against a cloudy beige background where the shadow of a single fishing boat appears in the distance. A silhouetted chain of barbed wire runs vertically down the subject's face, harshly cutting across the frame and flattening the ground of the image. 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.
Awazu’s early drawings and paintings harken to the work of the Japanese Reportage artists and 19th-century French Realism painters, using muted earth tones and thick, painterly strokes to depict anonymized laborers and pedestrians against industrializing landscapes that also bore the presence of the American occupation. Awazu's melancholic scenes reflect his status as part of a generation of artists who witnessed and came of age in World War II and its aftermath, as well as his involvement in left-wing politics.
His style began to evolve and take on more experimental, abstract qualities during the 1960s. 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.
Poster design
From the late 1950s onward, Awazu began to gain widespread recognition through film and theater promotional posters, and in 1958 received the top prize at the International Film Poster Contest held in Paris. "Posters, as images created expressly for the dissemination of information, are by their very nature a strongly 'public' form of art," Awazu reflected in 1982.Awazu possessed a rich language of motifs and styles that drew from a range of historical and popular references. 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!" as a rallying call for graphic design.
Many of Awazu's posters deal with political movements and social struggles, as evidenced by clients such as Shingeki theatre groups, the Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, and causes such as the Korean struggle for democracy and anti-Vietnam War activism.
In 1984, Awazu was commissioned by the Japan Graphic Designers Association to create the second poster for the annual Hiroshima Appeals series. Awazu's design, titled A Diversity of Birds, featured a densely packed canvas of seventeen birds of varying types, colors, and ages, rendered with textured strokes reminiscent of the quality of pastel crayons. 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.
Filmmaking
Awazu was active in avant-garde filmmaking circles as both a poster designer and an occasional filmmaker. While at Nikkatsu, he created promotional posters to accompany the foreign distribution of films such as The Baby Carriage, Children Who Draw, and The Burmese Harp. In contrast to the original domestic posters, which tended to feature photorealistic or photographic images of actors and were densely populated with text, Awazu's versions were far more austere and abstracted in nature, restrained in their chromatic variation, and rendered in a style reminiscent of abstract expressionist German woodcuts.In 1961, Awazu designed the poster for Hiroshi Teshigahara's Pitfall, which featured the fingerprint motif that would become one of the signature elements of Awazu's graphic vocabulary. He continued to work with Teshigahara on a number of occasions, designing the posters for the director's best-known work Woman in the Dunes, and The Face of Another. Awazu also produced a number of designs for Japanese releases of foreign films, including La Chinoise and Wind from the East.
Awazu held a long-standing fascination with Antoni Gaudí, and traveled to Spain to create a film of the architect's work, which was completed in 1975. He also created a number of experimental films throughout his career and sat on the board of Film Art Inc. alongside Teshigahara and Kisho Kurokawa.