NYAB Event - Hideki Inaba Exhibition

Hideki Inaba Exhibition

+81 Gallery NY

This event has ended.

Hideki Inaba’s talent flourished once he began working in editorial design after completing an engineering course. Inaba’s obvious imagination and adaptability towards graphic design led to his creations receiving almost instant international acclaim. His visual ingenuity would only become more apparent in his later work for SAL magazine. Influenced by the modern artists within its pages, Inaba produced a succession of simple yet striking covers that displayed a refined mastery of his trade. In a way this was the awakening of his new senses.

Meanwhile, following the footsteps of as photographer Nick Knight and graphic designer Peter Saville when they launched their experimental online art platform SHOWstudio in 2000, there was a wave of nineties designers like Ryan McGinness, Tomoo Gokita as well as graffiti scribes Kaws and WK Interact taking the turn of the new millennium as an opportunity to start fresh as artists. The times were shifting away from commercial design and graffiti to pure artistic production.

Inaba also released experimental artwork at his first solo exhibition “NEWLINE” in 2004, which featured pieces that added movement and time to planar typography on monitors. Successive motion granted the potential of new graphics to the text, along with a sense of life created by an expectation of movement in static images. This would mark the turning point where Inaba turned from commercial design to fully immerse himself in conceptual graphic art.

He followed up with the GRAPHIC LINE series, which showed a progression into even more detailed aggregations of fine lines. Inaba produced a more complex visual effect by changing his approach and adding a sense of motion to his graphics simply through combining dozens of simple elements. In his next series, Print Line, Inaba focused on capturing moments from the intricately evolving images and depicting them on paper. The act of taking stills of microscopic lines perfected on monitors and printing them on a physical medium proved difficult even with modern printing techniques. Inaba’s artwork is so intricate that in order to properly recreate it on paper, the prints had to be magnified to enormous sizes.

Though Inaba never stopped receiving requests for commercial work, what makes him different from others in the field is his ability to repurpose his original art into commercial designs. His projects for shu uemura, agnès b., and Louis Vuitton have all used his unadulterated creativity, and in that sense have been more akin to artistic collaborations than simple commissioned design work.

The fact that all of Inaba’s clients utilize his indecipherable fonts and masterful artwork in such collaborations shows how implicitly they trust his merit and skill.