aesthetics of joy

For a reserved culture, the Japanese certainly aren’t shy about color. Everywhere in Tokyo you find pops of the brightest hues, on doors and signage, traffic cones and taxicabs. The color comes in broad swathes and little bursts. Sometimes it’s functional color, telling you where to go or what to pay attention to. A big, bold color system like the one above makes an incredibly complex train system effortlessly navigable by non-Japanese speakers. At other times it’s purely joyful, a gratuitous flick of the paintbrush, a little dance of neon whose only purpose is to make you feel good.

Where along the way to becoming a civilized society did we lose color? This is the question I’ve been asking myself since the trip, as I’ve tried to understand the differences in how Americans and Japanese use color in our environment. Seriously, in the West our relationship to color is utterly dysfunctional. In office cubicles, condo complexes, subways, highways, sidewalks, malls — the contexts we spend most of our time in — the palette is a monochromatic blur of industrial taupes and dingy greys.

It would be wrong to say there’s no color in our urban landscapes. But look down a highway or in a city center and take notice: where do you see it? In the ads, of course. We damp down our rooms and streets so that the billboards can pop out, ensuring we can’t miss their consumerist banners. We are stingy with color where it could benefit the collective good; we are profligate with it when it’s a conduit to corporate gain.

In Japan, it is as if everyone understands the value of color, and adheres to a code to use it in a sensitive yet exuberant way.

This “book bar” at the Tsutaya Books in Daikanyama (one of the absolute don’t miss spots if you’re planning a trip to Tokyo) strikes me as a perfect example of relevant, natural color, harnessed in a delightful way.

These to-die-for lamps in the lobby of the Claska hotel are a perfect example of thoughtful color use. It’s so Japanese to put the color on the inside, where it isn’t aggressive and where the light can bring the color alive with its soft glow. More pops of color below (a few of which couldn’t help but make their way into my suitcase): the gallery at the Impossible Project, lighting from the amazing Danish flower shop Nicolai Bergman in Aoyama, a Patricia Urquiola chair in the roof garden at the Tokyu Plaza shopping center, colorful washi tapes at Tokyu Hands, colored pencils at stationery mecca Itoya, and joy stickers from Kiddyland.

The taxicabs! We spent an inordinate amount of time taking pictures of taxicabs, with their vibrant colors and playful stripes, checks, and patterns. They look like giant toy cars driving around the city. I can’t complain, living in a city that paints its taxis cheery yellow, but I do think there is something about the Japanese taxi palette that is really charming.

I saw dots everywhere in Tokyo. The joy of polka dots is probably another post entirely, but I loved seeing these various spots around the city. My absolute favorite was happening upon the red and white spotted packages of Tsumori Chisato outside the store (bottom left), ready for pickup. Can you imagine receiving one in the mail? How boring an Amazon box seems by comparison… On the bottom right is work by Koichiro Kimura, from his quirky and amazing gallery space in Aoyama.

It was also fun to stumble upon a Tokyo installation of Damien Hirst’s dots exhibit in the new Hikarie center. I had seen them at the two Chelsea Gagosian galleries earlier this year, but seeing them in Japan, they just seemed so perfectly at home. I love how even the exhibit key (bottom left) has a charming quality to it.

Images: mine and Erika Lee’s

In May, I went to Tokyo for work. (If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen a number of photos with the tag #joyinjapan.) For some, this might mean sitting in a conference center most of the time, getting to eat some sushi between lectures and walk around Shibuya a bit. But lucky me (and I mean that — lucky, lucky me), my job involves being completely out there, talking to people, experiencing the city’s smells, sounds, and colors, drinking a place in until I’m drunk.

Where do I begin with it all? I felt so joyful in Japan I could hardly stand it. Like when someone is tickling you and you’re laughing and you get to a point where feel like you’re going to explode and you beg them to stop — “Please, please, no more!” — and as the feeling subsides and you’re able to breathe again a quiet little voice pipes up inside you, whispering…

“More. Please, just a little more.”

There isn’t one thing to point to, but a thousand small gestures that accumulate to leave you almost woozy with delight. Tokyo is a relentless layering of vibrant color palettes, cute icons, sweet miniatures, subtle textures, and delicate objects arranged just so. (And also some things that are so crazy they make your head spin around in full revolutions.) It’s a testament to a people that has a true material culture, a people that feels kinship with the objects in their lives and understands that beautiful things are valuable not as status symbols but because they suffuse beauty into the spaces around them.

Alain de Botton writes: “What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.” This is the crux of what I felt in Tokyo. I sensed the beauty that emanated from the perfectly balanced, crafted way of things, and wanted to strive for more of this in myself. A beautifully crafted plate of food or a carefully lettered sign showed care, and it made me want to slow down and appreciate the care my hosts put into these small gestures. My travel companions and I all changed our behavior over the course of the week. We were more polite, we noticed more, we ate more slowly. We let the place change us in a good way.

Every day we walked the city until our feet hurt. At night, I would wake up at about 4am from the jet lag, my feet still pulsing, hoping a few more hours of sleep would ease them. We took thousands of photos. There was a surprise around nearly every corner — we were afraid to put our cameras away. My travel companions, fellow IDEOers Anthony and Erika, and I (all above) were lucky to have some amazing hosts. In some of my photos you’ll see Mike, a good friend of mine since my first day at IDEO, who is now in our Tokyo office. He wins the “host of the year” award, making sure we saw his favorite places (such as the tiny coffee shop pictured top right and lower left, below), ordered for us in places with no English menus, and even pointed us towards very specific observations, like that that gorgeous reflection of the copper sink in Higashiyama’s bathrooms (below).

I was also excited to spend some time with Azusa, a friend of mine from Pratt (you may remember her joyful work from this post a few years back). Azusa took us one night to get yuzu ramen (noodles flavored with yuzu, a Japanese citrus fruit) and after, we discovered a tiny little bar with only about ten seats. There, a bartender proceeded to make the most thoughtful screwdriver I’ve ever seen. The screwdriver must be the most thoughtless of cocktails, sloshed together in questionable proportions, often in a Solo cup. But this bartender showed me the screwdriver-as-art-form: squeezing the juice by hand, shaking the drink as if he were in slow motion. I don’t think I will ever see a cocktail performed in that way again, totally simple, yet with honor for its simplicity.

We stayed our last few nights at the Claska, technically the only boutique hotel in Tokyo. The Claska is a wonderful, odd place for many reasons. It is a bit out of the way, but it has a gorgeous sixties modern lobby and the most beautiful gift shop, full of perfect, quirky artifacts. But by far my favorite feature of the Claska is the retro dog grooming salon just off the lobby (pictured above). A long window, positioned at eye level just by the lobby bar, peeks into the space, where you can watch dogs get fluffed to the max by a passel of groomers using humorously space-age dryers. I never saw a dog walk out of there that didn’t look like it couldn’t blow away on a light wind.

A highlight was a visit to Midori Sushi in Shibuya, where you order from an iPad and the sushi is delivered to your table by toy trains. Toy! Trains! You might think that with such an emphasis on precision and self-control, the Japanese would not show much evidence of their “inner child.” But in fact, the inner child is alive and well in Japan, breaking through in an unabashed embrace of cuteness and play, even in serious situations. The toy train idea is something that seems to have been thought up by an eight year-old. Here in the states it would be discarded as ridiculous, but fortunately the Japanese don’t censor themselves in this way.

On our very last day in Tokyo, Erika and I were wandering around the area near Gakugei-Daigaku station and spotted these beautiful books. Stripped of their jackets, they were selling for pennies apiece, and we spent the better part of an hour looking for ones with interesting illustrations to bring back with us. Inside one were these very simple, beautiful erotic line drawings. (Japan has a long tradition of exuberant erotic art, mostly woodblock prints known as shunga.) Azusa was embarrassed but obliging in translating the chapter headers for us. (Nothing too exciting, or I promise I would’ve written them down to share.)

Hidari Pocket in Naka Meguro is the tiniest, cutest café I have ever seen. The garlands, the little drawings on the side of the van, the tiny weathered stools, the drawings of flowers in the foam on the mocha — it was just too much. In moments like this, we often found ourselves overcome, aesthetically, with the experiences we were having. It was almost as if the circuits in our brains couldn’t handle all the beauty, harmony, cuteness, and cleverness. By a few days in, we actually coined a name for this: design convulsions. Suffice it to say, when three out of four designers at a table have their cameras pointed at a very ordinary object, you can be pretty sure it’s a collective design convulsion.

There is a palimpsestic quality to Tokyo that you start to discover, as you adjust to it and it starts to unfold for you. There are layers that smack you in the face with their daring or their sweetness. But underpinning these are tiers of sensation: patterns, textures, and reflections that are seductive in their simplicity. I came back so filled with inspiration, I was nearly vibrating. I’ll share more in the coming days, about some specific things that just took my breath away. In the meantime, have you been to Tokyo? What joys did you see there?

Images: a mix of mine and Erika Lee’s; most of the better ones are Erika’s!

It’s Sunday and it is too hot. Time to slow things down, people. I don’t know about you, but my feet did not touch the pavement this week. I was all over this city — eastside, westside, uptown, downtown, high line, subway, ferry, rooftop, sidewalk, garden. I’m putting on the afterburners today: yoga, worn-in clothes, air-dry hair, peanut butter out of the jar, counter-ripened peaches, herbal tea, naps (yes, plural), magazines (just the pictures), crossword puzzle, daydreams. And this video, in which it is very easy to simply get lost. A half-mad man blowing lovely, giant bubbles, about as slow and airy as my thoughts today.

I hope you’re finding some time to slow down and be joyful today. Tomorrow’s for running. Sit still while you can.

Have you seen the madness that is the installation created for the Dior 2012 AW haute couture show? These photos leave me a bit breathless. Giddy, like I could forget the clothes entirely, see a show of forty models in paper bags, and rave that it was the best thing I’d ever seen in fashion. Flowers can make even the sanest person lose their mind.

This joyful superabundance is the work of Raf Simons (and dozens of floral stylists — view the “Making of…” here), who debuted as Dior’s new creative director with this show. Clearly, he felt he needed to make an impact. The inspiration is Christian Dior’s own idea of the “flower women,” referring to his famous, very feminine silhouettes of the 40s. Beyond that, I don’t think we can get too analytical about it. The show notes are mostly gobbledygook. (A sample:  ”This is one of the ways Christian Dior’s ‘Flower Women’… become contemporary in the collection; the architecture of flowers is analysed in a different way for the contemporary world.”)

Anyway, the experience speaks for itself. This isn’t about the architecture of flowers, it’s about the pleasure of flowers. It’s about a fantasy made real. It is pure, immersive, sensory joy. There’s really only one thing to do with it, and that’s to enjoy it. Happy daydreaming!

Via: The House That Lars Built

And if you want more flowers, check out the technicolor landscapes of the Netherlands as the tulips are blooming.

Glasgow-based artist Jim Lambie creates installations out of vinyl tape that make spaces come alive with an intense energy. Tracing the contours of a room’s perimeter, his work seems to magnify the lines of the structures, surfacing patterns from static-seeming architecture. It’s almost as if he’s liberating the movement from the space, giving it voice through color.

The kinetic force of Lambie’s work may stem from his origins in music. He has said:

You put a record on and it’s like all the edges disappear. You’re in a psychological space. You don’t sit there thinking about the music, you’re listening to the music. You’re inside that space that the music’s making for you.

This is true about music: it’s something you inhabit rather than something you regard. It’s also true that music has an inherent movement, a temporal thrust, a pace and vibration. Music, with its long oscillations, jostles the air around us, scatters its molecules and sends them pinging against our eardrums. We don’t see it, but music transforms a room into a thoroughly kinetic space. Lambie’s color similarly fills the space with vibrations.

While I object to the comparison with Pollock, I feel sympathy with Jonathan Jones of The Guardian when he writes in 2008:

Like Pollock he pours colour and line in ways that liberate energy and suggest the inner structures of the cosmos. Above all, Lambie is a pure artist – his art is totally self-sufficient in its worth and power. It is distilled energy, concentrated life. Marvellous stuff.

Right now I’m steeped in the study of energy – photons, pulsations, valences, spectrums – and thinking a lot about movement at all scales, from the quiver of electrons to the whirl of the planets. But it all comes back to aesthetics for me: how we feel this energy through our senses, and once felt, how it affects us. Lambie’s work is just poppy and irreverent enough to seem like play, but that hides its power. This is potent stuff: bracing, fervent, and vital.

Via: Bjorn’s Randoms

Further to my post a couple of weeks ago about the power of color to enliven, check out this story of Jim Cotter, a widower from Glouster, Ohio who decided to fix up his town by painting buildings with bright colors. (CBS has disabled embedding, so click here to watch the short clip.)

Could there be any clearer illustration of the impact the things around us can have on our lives? I think Bonnie Shifflet, owner of a restaurant painted bright orange by Cotter, says it best when she says of the paint job, “It just did something to me.” I love that this started with one widower and has become a movement that the whole town has joined in. And that it went from one fire hydrant to twenty buildings. This is what inspires me about joy — its contagiousness. A piece in the Columbus Dispatch notes:

[Cotter] has reason to be hopeful. Not long after the project started, the owners of a hair salon on High Street saw what was happening in the neighborhood and had the store’s walls power-washed.

They plan to paint next.

What small action could you take today that might start something much bigger? How could you make it visible so others, even those you don’t know yet, can join in?

Source: Ohio Widower Paints the Town to Make it a Brighter Place, CBS News
Image and quote: Coats of Kindness, Columbus Dispatch

And thanks, Dad, for the tip!

Last year on the 4th of July, I gathered with a horde of others on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade to try to catch a glimpse of the Hudson River fireworks display. It was a crowd united by optimism. We had the whole city of Manhattan between us and the lights, as imposing fence as could exist, but still we were all there, hopeful and wanting. So when the first booms sounded, and a few reflected glimmers sneaked through the slices of sky between buildings, there were cheers and hollers. Like a bunch of vagabonds peering into a theater from the rafters, we saw only halos and flecks, but it didn’t matter because we part of it. Celebration is so abundant, even its detritus is joyful. You can bask in its leftovers for weeks.

These amazing vintage fireworks labels (courtesy of British pyrotechnics enthusiast and historian Steven Johnson and his Firework Heritage Museum) give off no light or noise, but they have a similar kind of joyful residue. The various stars and sunbursts, flickers and flames, twinkles and sparks: they’re so evocative, you can almost hear the pops, hisses, and crackles, building a kind of aesthetic anticipation. You can’t wait to strike a match and see what happens.

And the names! One year my mother, Nana, and I all watched the fireworks together, coming up with names for all the different effects. But Spangled Star Bomb? Brock’s Twinkler? Radium Dazzler? Those old firework-makers had a poetic flair and a joyful spirit that has us completely beat. (Though I think “Wonder Banger” might have shifted meaning a bit since then.)

I’m off to try to see the fireworks again, this time from the slightly better vantage point of some friends’ rooftop. If I see any, you’ll find them on Instagram. I hope you’re seeing fireworks somewhere tonight too. But if not, be like the clever Sean Ohlenkamp and make some of your own. Have a Flambo Jambo 4th of July!