Kiyoshi Awazu

Kiyoshi Awazu
Born	February 19, 1929 Meguro, Tokyo, Empire of Japan
Died	April 28, 2009 Kawasaki, Kanagawa, Japan
Nationality	Japan

Kiyoshi Awazu (Japanese: 粟津　潔, romanized: Awazu Kiyoshi, February 19, 1929 – April 28, 2009) was a Japanese graphic designer, active in the post-WWII era in the fields of poster design, architecture design, set design, and filmmaking. A self-taught artist, Awazu possessed an eclectic and variegated graphic style that made use of vibrant color palettes, appropriated and subverted motifs from 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.

Biography

Early life

Kiyoshi Awazu was born in 1929 in Himonya, Meguro ward. Before he turned one years old, his father, an electrical lab technician in the Ministry of Communications, died in a train accident at the age of thirty. At the age of four, his mother remarried to a dressmaker and Awazu 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 vocational 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 (Nihon sakuga kyōkai), 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.

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 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 [Give Back Our Oceans] 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 the trajectory of his graphic design career.

His style began to evolve and acquire a greater experimental sensibility through the 1960s, resisting the formal conventions of mid-century modernism and instead opting for more expressive, variable forms that made use of sketches, ideograms, motifs culled from folklore and mythology, as well a a vibrant pop color palette that became synonymous with his style.

Nibankan, Kabukichō, Tokyo. Architectural design by Minoru Takeyama, exterior graphics by Kiyoshi Awazu.

Involvement in architecture

During the 1960s and 1970s in Japan, interest in the notion of "environmental art" (kankyо̄ bijutsu) as a conceptual framework for dissolving the boundaries between applied and fine arts, and dynamically integrating disciplines such as painting, sculpture, architecture, design, photography, music, and performance. These ideas were made manifest through group exhibitions such as From Space to Environment in 1966, as well as collaborative design projects. Awazu too was deeply engaged with interdisciplinary projects throughout his career, and was particularly involved with the Metabolism group during the late 1950s and 1960s, who put forth theories of urban growth through the prism of biological metaphors.

Awazu designed key elements of the group's graphic identity, such as the logo and opening pages for each chapter of the group's manifesto booklet METABOLISM 1960, and also designed books by several of the members, including Kawazoe Noboru’s Contemporary Japanese Architecture (1973) and Kisho Kurokawa's The Work of Kisho Kurokawa: Capsule, Spaceframe, Metabolism, Metamorphose (1970), which featured vibrant assemblages of the architect's structural innovations, surrealist motifs, and expressive typography to illustrate the dynamism of the architect's multimodal vision and imagination. Awazu's logo for the Metabolism movement was a riff on a three-pronged tomoe, a traditional Japanese motif with comma-like swirls. The scale of the three elements was subtly altered such that they each differed in size (a departure from the traditional composition which features equally-sized elements), suggesting gradual growth rather than endless circularity to echo the ambitions of the architectural collective.

Exhibitions and Collections

In 2007, the Awazu Design Studio donated 2,932 artworks and archival materials to the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. From 2014 to 2018, the museum organized a five-part series of exhibitions dedicated to various dimensions of Awazu's practice, including his involvement in architecture, performance, and photography.