PROFILE

Description

Description

The DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion was established in 2008 as part of DNP Dai Nippon Printing's 130th anniversary celebrations, and was transformed from a foundation to a public interest incorporated foundation in 2012. Their projects include exhibitions, educational outreach, archiving, international exchange and academic research funding. The Archive is responsible for the collection, preservation and management of outstanding works of graphic art and graphic design and related materials, with the aim of passing on a valuable cultural heritage to future generations. The two main collections are the Tyler Graphics Archive Collection of contemporary American prints, and the DNP Graphic Design Archive (DGA), a comprehensive collection of contemporary domestic and international graphic design, primarily posters.
The DGA has the largest collection of works by three of Japan's leading graphic designers: Ikko Tanaka, Shigeo Fukuda and Kazumasa Nagai. Its contents include Ikko Tanaka (approximately 54,000 posters, prints, original drawings, positive films, published articles, library books, and posters and prints by other artists), Shigeo Fukuda (approximately 4,000 posters, prints, positive films, and posters and prints by other artists), and Kazumasa Nagai (approximately 7,000 posters, prints, packaged works, original drawings, prints, published articles, positive films, library books, and posters and prints by other artists). There are also many other works and materials donated by national and international designers.
As of March 2016, they have 233 designers in its collection (117 domestic and 116 international), with a total of approximately 14,000 works. These collections are used in many ways, such as organising exhibitions in the Foundation's galleries, lending and donating to museums and educational institutions, researching and studying graphic design, funding academic research, and creating digital databases and making information available on the internet.

Report

Report

The time will come when the revitalisation of archive activities will also lead to the revitalisation of the Japanese design world as a whole.

Born from a suggestion by Ikko Tanaka.

It was in the 1960s that Japanese graphic design began to gain international recognition. Yusaku Kamekura's poster for the TOKYO 1964 Olympic Games made the presence of Japanese design felt around the world. This was followed by a series of national events, including the Japan World Exposition, Osaka 1970 and the Sapporo 1972 Winter Olympics Games, in which the work on posters and symbols played an important role. Since then, Japanese graphic designers have expanded their activities both at home and abroad.
Ikko Tanaka, one of DGA's three major collectors, also designed the facility symbols and the participation medals for the TOKYO 1964 Olympic Games, a collaboration with Taro Okamoto. He also designed the exhibition of the Japanese Government Pavilion No.1 at the Japan World Exposition, Osaka 1970, was art director of the Saison Group, and was involved with MUJI from its inception, designing its logo. He was also keen to create a gallery where graphic designers could present their work and activities. One of these is DNP Dai Nippon Printing's Ginza Graphic Gallery (ggg) in Ginza, Tokyo. The building where ggg is now located originally served only as the company's sales department, but Tanaka thought it would be a good use of the space and suggested creating a gallery space. This led to the creation of ggg as a cultural initiative in 1986. Later, Tanaka also supervised the planning of the exhibitions.
There are currently three galleries operated by DNP Dai Nippon Printing, including ggg, the CCGA Center for Contemporary Graphic Art, established in 1995 in Sukagawa City, Fukushima Prefecture, due to its beautiful natural environment and its suitability for art conservation, and the Kyoto ddd Gallery, relocated from Osaka to Kyoto in 2014. DNP continues to promote cultural projects in the field of graphic design and graphic arts through these activities.

Carrying on our precious cultural heritage.

The establishment of the DNP Graphic Design Archive (DGA), a collection of contemporary graphic design, mainly posters, was also inspired by a proposal from Ikko Tanaka.
It was the turn of the century and we were about to enter the 21st century. Since the end of the 1990s, many great designers have passed away, including Yusaku Kamekura, Ryuichi Yamashiro, Tadashi Ohashi, and overseas, Paul Rand, Saul Bass and Josef Müller-Brockmann. Tanaka's idea was not just to have exhibitions in the gallery as they are, but to pass on a valuable cultural heritage to future generations.
The DGA was also established in 2000 with the aim of improving the systematic and systematic collection and conservation of design compared to art. From 2000 to 2002, the DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion organised three exhibitions at the CCGA Center for Contemporary Graphic Art, inviting graphic designers to donate their work.
The first exhibition in 2000 included Yusaku Kamekura, Yoshio Hayakawa, Kazumasa Nagai, Ikko Tanaka, Mitsuo Katsui and Shigeo Fukuda. The second edition in 2001 was attended by Makoto Nakamura, Tadahito Nadamoto, Tsunehisa Kimura, Kiyoshi Awazu, Akira Uno, Tadanori Yokoo and Kouga Hirano. In 2002, the third edition included Masuteru Aoba, Katsumi Asaba, Takahisa Kamijo, Ryohei Kojima, Masayoshi Nakajo, Shin Matsunaga and K2 (Keisuke Nagatomo and Seitaro Kuroda). Designers who agreed with the aim of the activity participated, and their masterpieces were displayed and donated to the DGA.
For the opening, everyone travelled to the CCGA in Sukagawa City, Fukushima Prefecture, where there was great interest in the future use and preservation of the archive.

Relationships were nurtured around the gallery.

The foundation of the DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion's ability to house such a valuable archive is based on the personal relationships and trust between designers and curators that have been nurtured over the years, starting with the DGA's inaugural exhibition and continuing with exhibitions at the company's three galleries. The family of Ikko Tanaka donated almost all of his works and materials in 2008. In 2009, the family of Shigeo Fukuda donated his works, and in 2010, Kazumasa Nagai donated his works and documents, which had been stored at the Nippon Design Center and at his home.
Fukuda designed the poster for the EXPO'70 Japan World Exposition, Osaka 1970, while Nagai designed the symbol for the Sapporo 1972 Winter Olympics Games, and participated in the establishment of the Nippon Design Center with Tanaka in 1960, all of whom were active in the early days of Japanese design. Fukuda and Nagai are directors of the DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion, and Nagai took over the supervision of ggg after Tanaka's passed away.
Eiko Ishioka had said before her passing that she wanted all her posters to be donated to the DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion, and her bereaved family (her sister Reiko Ishioka, art director) donated all 476 posters. In addition to advertising for SHISEIDO and PARCO, Ishioka is an internationally acclaimed art director who has designed stage spaces and costumes for film and theatre, and has won an Academy Awards and a Grammy Awards. As there were several copies of each, they donated a set to the Musashino Art University Museum & Library through the DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion. The families of Kenji Ito and Kan Akita also donated almost all of their posters. Artist and graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo, who opened the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art in Hyogo Prefecture in 2012, has about 700 major posters from the 1970s onwards in the collection of the DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion. Incidentally, some of Yokoo's most valuable posters from the 1960s were in the collection donated by Ikko Tanaka. Tanaka has a large collection of posters and prints by other designers, some of which are very valuable.
In 2015, at the age of 76, Katsumi Asaba, who is still at the forefront of his field, donated some 1,300 posters that he had previously kept in a warehouse. Other recent donations include 500 pieces by Shin Matsunaga, 351 pieces by Makoto Nakamura, 314 pieces by Katsuhiko Hibino and 173 pieces by Tsuguya Inoue. From abroad, through the organisation of the exhibition, there are 42 pieces from Michel Bouvet in France, 137 pieces from Paul Davis in the UK and 24 pieces from Theseus Chan in Singapore.
At present, the DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion has a collection of about 90% of the major post-war Japanese graphic design posters. The DGA's collection is housed in storage cases in a humidity-controlled warehouse attached to the CCGA.

Three activities based on the collection

The DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion has three main activities based on these collections. The first is to lend or donate them to national and international museums, galleries, design and educational institutions. The aim is to promote the cultural heritage of graphic design throughout the world and to pass it on to future generations.
Some of the DGA's three major collections of posters by Ikko Tanaka, Shigeo Fukuda and Kazumasa Nagai are housed at the CCGA, while others are being donated to appropriate museums in Japan and abroad. The museums they have donated to so far include the Iwate Museum of Art, Nara Prefectural Museum of Art, Musashino Art University Museum & Library, Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague (Czech Republic), Kunsthaus Zürich (Switzerland) and Die Neue Sammlung, Design Museum (Germany).
The second activity is the construction of an archive of the collection, led by the CCGA Director, Hideyuki Kido. As mentioned above, the designers who led the post-war graphic design world are passing away, while the history of art and design and the history of culture in post-war Japan are becoming the subject of academic research by researchers in the history of art and design and Japanese studies around the world. The existence of a well-developed archive is essential for such academic research, but unfortunately until now there has been no real archive of graphic design in Japan.
In order to open up this valuable collection to academic research, the DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion has been working on the development of metadata, the creation of a database, and the production of high-resolution digital images. In the near future, a database of the collection will be made available on the Internet. The archives need to comply with international standards in order to be academically sound and to collaborate with other institutions, but they are also working to build an academic archive in the field of graphic design, drawing on existing specialist archives in other fields and exchanging information with universities and museums.

Grant for academic research on graphic culture

In addition to running the gallery and building the archive, they also launched a programme of academic research grants in 2014. The aim is to contribute to the development of graphic design and graphic arts culture and the promotion of academic research by providing grants to around 10 researchers each year for research themes related to graphic design and graphic arts from a wide range of academic disciplines. There are two divisions: Division A, for research on graphic design and graphic art in general, and Division B, for research on Ikko Tanaka, which receives more than 40 applications from Japan and abroad every year. The selected researchers are expected to carry out their research for approximately one to two years and submit a paper on their findings. As of November 2016, a total of 37 themes have been funded to date, with the first research bulletin due to be published in 2017.

What is the ideal design museum?

Eishi Kitazawa, curator of ggg and Kyoto ddd, and active in the DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion, is one of the people who have developed friendships and relationships with the designers through the exhibitions. What does Kitazawa think an ideal design museum should be like?
"In September 2016, ggg presented a high-profile exhibition, "NOSIGNER - REASON BEHIND FORMS -". It seems to me that this exhibition suggests what the future of a design museum might look like. In this exhibition, the design group NOSIGNER, led by Eisuke TACHIKAWA, focuses on the reasons why design and form are created, from the point of view that "design is the biology of things", and aims to learn the act of "design" from the observation of the process by which natural phenomena create form. For example, insects such as butterflies, marine life such as shellfish, animals such as birds and zebras, natural forms such as plants, the elucidation of the design behind natural phenomena such as lightning, or the contrast between an olive tree and a fan. In other words, the exhibition was an experiment to demonstrate that human design is (or should be) as close as possible to the forms woven by nature.
While ggg is usually thought of as a gallery showing posters, advertising, bookbinding, illustration and packaging design, I think this exhibition was as much a deconstruction of the design thought process as it was a new marker of the diversity of design.
In this way, I think it will be necessary for the future design museum concept to consider design from a biological and evolutionary point of view. The ideal exhibition is not just an industrial museum, but a space where the viewer can feel at one with the work, where the process of its creation, the traces and sources of thought, the worries and inspirations are conveyed. I was struck by a tweet from a graphic designer who saw the exhibition. 'The designer of the future will have to be like Leonardo da Vinci, who was a jack-of-all-trades: artist, scholar and engineer'. I was strangely convinced, and I felt that the future of design was entrusted to this very tweet. It may be an extreme view, but I think that an ideal design museum would have the awareness and perspective that 'all things contain design', and would be able to communicate this in a variety of ways, and moreover in an infinite number of ways.
From an archival point of view, one of the leading design museums in Switzerland, the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, is a must-see in its collection. Since 1875, the museum has been organising its collection in four categories: design, graphics, applied arts and posters. The poster archive, with 350,000 posters from all over the world, is one of the most impressive. Of course they collect all Swiss posters. The design section houses everything from fashion to musical instruments, furniture, household appliances, folk art and toys. In the packaging department, you'll find pizza delivery boxes and even large quantities of sugar cube wrappers. Amazingly, as it is impossible to display and show all the objects in the collection, there are also regular tours of the storeroom, five days a week. What a wonderful thing to have a storage space as an exhibition space".

The future of graphic design in Japan

The advent of the computer in the 1990s had a significant impact on the international reputation of post-war Japanese graphic design. Kitazawa's thoughts on today's computer-aided design and the future of paper media.
"Before that, the works of Yusaku Kamekura, Yoshio Hayakawa, Kazumasa Nagai, Ikko Tanaka, Shigeo Fukuda, Tadanori Yokoo, Eiko Ishioka, Katsumi Asaba, Shin Matsunaga and others were so distinctive that it was easy to tell who had designed them just by looking at them. All the works had a timeless, universal aura and were full of a generous, experimental spirit that did not flatter anyone. They drew on the traditions of Japanese art of the past and the spirit of the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism of the West, and brought them to fruition in their work.
In comparison, today's designers do not seem to have inherited their DNA. Since the 1990s, indeed, the function of graphic design has changed from being expression-oriented to problem-solving, and from problem-solving to problem-posing, with the added influence of digitalisation. However, I think that the basic strength of designers as a whole has fallen considerably.
In recent years, the number of posters produced has fallen dramatically as the method of poster production has become increasingly digital, from printing to digital output. Already today, printing proofers are no longer manufactured. Paper posters are being replaced at stations by LED electric signs. Thus, it is said that the paper medium of posters may be coming to an end. However, we can't help worrying about the critical situation of the poster media. From an archival point of view, we are at a very important moment. The paper posters currently in the collection of the DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion will become an even more valuable medium in the future, as these posters begin to have the same value as, for example, the Ukiyo-e prints of the Edo period, which had a profound influence on the world of Cézanne and Van Gogh. In fact, we frequently receive offers from Asia and Europe to present Japanese posters".
The time is coming when the revitalisation of archiving activities will also lead to the revitalisation of the Japanese design world as a whole.

Enquiry:

DNP Foundation for Cultural Promotion　http://www.dnp.co.jp/foundation/