Hideki Nakajima, a Japanese graphic designer who has designed publications, records and exhibition visions for Ryuichi Sakamoto, Daichi Moriyama, Keisuke Araki, Yayoi Kusama and many other musicians, photographers, artists, and exhibition visions, has brought more than 350 graphic design works to China from 1990 to 2017.
> Cut, No. 290
Looking back at Hideki Nakajima's 27 years of graphic design, the film magazine cut can be said to be an important turning point in his design career. In 1989, Hideki Nakajima worked on the design of the inaugural issue of cut at Shimizu Masaki Design Firm, and until the latest issue of cut (Issue 391, January 2018), Hideki Nakajima served as the design and art director of cut.
Rockin'on published Cut to create a world-class visual magazine. In the early 1990s, with insufficient funds and time, Hideki Nakajima continued to experiment with a lot of visual experiments with fonts, doing his best to turn his ideas into reality, and trying to use various techniques to make the full use of the potential impact of fonts on readers.
> Cut# 23
> Cut, No. 116
While doing design and editing work for Cut, Hideki Nakajima often stayed up late. At that time, Shimizu Masayoshi Design Firm was an advertising design company, and editorial design was only part of the business. "People in the company told me that cut wouldn't be done until after twelve o'clock in the evening. I've had two consecutive days of work, or 120 hours, without closing my eyes. Another time, when I came back to my senses, my fingers and bones were cut by manual paper cutters, and I did not go to the hospital, so I wrapped the wound with a tissue, tied it with scotch tape, and continued the design work at hand. Hideki Nakajima recalled.
> Cut# 60
"Although the fate of 90% of magazines is destined to go into the trash, even 10% hope that they will not be discarded when they move, and if 0.1% can appear in the old bookstore in 20 years, this is my biggest ideal." 」 Hideki Nakajima has always faced design work with such enthusiasm and motivation, which has allowed him to persist from the beginning to the present.
It is rare to know oneself in life. In 1995, Hideki Nakajima designed the photo album "n/y" for Ryuichi Sakamoto, and the two have been deeply related for 23 years. Their collaboration is seen as a model of collaboration between graphic designers and musicians, where music and images coexist in their works, and Hideki Nakajima's graphic designs visually translate the music created by Ryuichi Sakamoto.
> Cut# 75
The most impressive one is the 1999 book "Sample Life" designed by Hideki Nakajima for Ryuichi Sakamoto. The outer packaging is an a4-sized white box with a layer of white printed on the surface of the white box with screen, while different whites produce different layers through weak contrasts. This feature cannot be easily felt without careful observation and touch.
Open the box and inside are 4 white papers of different sizes and a translucent envelope, and the text on the cover is hidden by 4 different printing processes. Through the re-combing of information, Hideki Nakajima uses different sizes, processes, and text arrangement forms to create a variety of different reading experiences that correspond to the content of each part. The cover text of "tex t" is partially reversed; the cover text of "pictures" is printed with bright oil; the text of the "diary" title is printed with transparent UV brush; the cover information of "scope and interview" is printed with letterpress; and the translucent envelope contains pictures of different sizes of body parts of Ryuichi Sakamoto that have been "dismembered", reshaping the image of Ryuichi Sakamoto with a "snooping" mentality. In "scope and interview", Hideki Nakajima obscures the score with black patches and expands the area of the patches, from single to complex, and the rhythm of this color block changes as if forming a unique visual music.
> Cut, No. 63
Hideki Nakajima and Ryuichi Sakamoto are a pair of close friends who are connected to each other and can cooperate with each other, both of them prefer minimalism and are eager to remove the barriers between music and design. Ryuichi Sakamoto once said of Nakajima's work: "Hideki Nakajima's design is not only aesthetically pleasing, but also on the edge of rules, sometimes over the edge. His design and my music have the same meaning. "Nakajima and Ryuichi Sakamoto have a certain commonality in the way they think about problems. Hideki Nakajima and Ryuichi Sakamoto do not meet often, and they only have the opportunity to meet once or twice a year, but the communication between them does not use words or express their feelings through music, and Ryuichi Sakamoto's thinking and sensitivity, as well as those things that are special to him, Hideki Nakajima sees them in his eyes, and keenly captures them, and then injects them into the design, just as Ryuichi Sakamoto expresses through his music. The relationship between the two is like that between a person and a shadow.
In fact, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Hideki Nakajima also set up a "code" group together and co-published the experimental work "s/n."
In addition to the commissioning of commercial projects, Hideki Nakajima is willing to explore some spontaneous projects. He believes that graphic design is not only a commercial client, and the reason he wants to do these spontaneous projects is because he is loyal to graphic design. Although he does not consider himself an artist, in these works he has been personally blurring the boundaries between art and design.
In 2008, there were 10 posters in the infinite libraries series. Invited by the American visual artist and writer Gustavo alberto garcia vaca, Hideki Nakajima used the concept of "whiter than paper" in the poster. When light shines on the poster, the text becomes whiter than the paper. In different "libraries", that is, different posters, poems are placed as printed elements. Each poster was printed on a different paper, with a print size set at 50.
> Hideki Nakajima's graphic design for the film magazine cut
In April 2005, Hideki Nakajima created a series of posters for the "Seven-Person Exhibition" held in Hong Kong. It is a continuation of a work published in the German magazine 032c in 2004, and information such as the participating designers and exhibition venues has been deleted. The outer outline of the red rose on the poster in the middle is the result of Hideki Nakajima drawing three times with a ballpoint pen. He believes that it is very courageous to paint only a few strokes. When computers could be used to modify works at will, he liked the technology, but he wasn't sure it was a good thing.
> I have no idea what design mean
Through these experiments and creations of print media, Hideki Nakajima puts the productivity of print media on the opposite side of production—intervening with a personal will that is variable and imperfect to counter the growing unification tendency in the field of graphic design due to the use of digital processing technology.
It is the continuous exploration and experimentation that allows him to constantly open up himself in design and break all possibilities of creativity. In any case, whether it is a commercial commissioned project or a spontaneous expression of personal will and self-creation, it is the "experiment" itself, and it is also the basic meaning of the existence of the experiment.
> Hideki Nakajima's album A Century of Change for Ryuichi Sakamoto
Hideki Nakajima's understanding of graphic design began to shift gradually after the publication of his first portfolio in 1999, shifting from a visual tension to a visual cue; from striking to engaging; from a viewable design to a readable design. This shift is clearly based on his intrinsically deeper understanding of "communication", and what underpins his minimalist visual expression is a more complex thinking about the matter of "information transmission".
> posters for the "infinite libraries" series
Graphic design exists as a way to convey information, but vision is not unique. "Experience" may be a better form of communication than a single visual communication. He transforms from an external visual tension into a minimalist expression of the inner abstraction, which is presented in many forms. For example, the light that appears only in the dark; the image that appears only after being heated; the hidden page that is only found in the process of careful reading, all of which are the visual joys waiting to be discovered by those who are willing to spend time exploring Hideki Nakajima's works. But to understand the secret hideous in Hideki Nakajima's design simply as the use of craftsmanship is actually a misjudgment. When the printing process corresponds closely to the subject until it is parallel, the former becomes the subject of the content, rather than the expression. More importantly, Hideki Nakajima's foreshadowing in his work is precisely the place where readers can discover joy. "If you look closely at my work, you will be able to find out my insistence on some of the details." Nakajima said.
> A book designed by Hideki Nakajima
The Sentimental Journey 2 book, designed by Hideki Nakajima for Keisuke Araki, is only 32 pages long. But this thin volume is more painstaking than the design of the thick book. Hideki Nakajima has established a complete reading rhythm through paper differences, picture order, and flipping through the way—the beginning, climax, end, and stop are all reflected in the thin 32 pages, and even the echo part. The most impressive detail is the red thread used in the binding, such a thin red line that adds a faint layer of lust or sorrow to the black and white photographs – and this is also Hideki Nakajima's final interpretation of the sentimental journey.
On the cover of the Sun photo album designed for Rika Noguchi, there is a huge black rectangle, which is all about the cover, but when the black part is heated, it will gradually reveal a photo of the sun taken by the author, and the sun is also the theme of the entire album. Hideki Nakajima uses a special warm-sensitive ink (which becomes transparent after heat) as a reading and response to Rika Noguchi's work.
Hideki Nakajima's design enlightenment was a juvenile record store. In the record store, the 17-year-old saw Peter Peter Saville's album cover for the band Omd made him determined to become a graphic designer. "I felt more than being surprised by the design as I was discovering that what I was supposed to do had already been done." Hideki Nakajima said.
> album designed by Hideki Nakajima
Hideki Nakajima usually loves to listen to music, and there seems to be a certain musicality in his designs, and some people once commented that Nakajima's designs are like sheet music that he has never heard before, and he also feels the same way. But on the other hand, he questions the argument that music and graphic art can be well combined.
Designing records for Ryuichi Sakamoto was just the beginning, and he also designed numerous record sleeves for Kazuyoshi Nakamura, Sugar Soul, Miki Nakatani, Shoko Suzuki, Masaharu Fukuyama, Miyu Sakamoto, and others, and the total number of records he has designed has exceeded 300. Such a huge number, which is almost equivalent to a musical generation.
The design of publications occupies a considerable volume in the work of Hideki Nakajima, who has maintained close design cooperation with many artists for a long time, but whether it is designing a small number of albums for artists or photographers, or designing a series of books for mainstream publishing houses such as Kodansha or Toto Publishing, he has always been able to find his own unique form of expression in different projects. When someone says bluntly that "design is for business", he does not agree at all: "Designers cannot pursue profit on a book with a print capacity of only 100 copies".
> Hideki Nakajima's album Spoon/Missing You for Ryuichi Kawamura
Each issue of the foil special feature will be with a different designer. In this issue (foil vol.7) with Hideki Nakajima, he spells the title with punches in the cover. Hideki Nakajima said: "This design is inspired by passports, when used passports are sent back, there are always small holes in them that sink down. And the small holes in the cover of each foil vol.7 vary in depth, and none of them are exactly the same. After flipping through, these small holes will gradually decrease until they disappear.
In 2009, Hideki Nakajima collaborated with Kengo Kuma to design an architecture book, Studies in Organic Kengo Kuma & Associates. The text on the cover of the title uses a warm ink, and when you rub the title with your hand, the part of the text disappears, and Nakajima uses this way to respond to the first text written by Kengo Kuma in the book, "Eliminating the Body". Remove the outer cover and unfold it to get a poster 36×47cm in size. The text and pictures throughout the book are very freely arranged, full of details and changes. In the final part of the book, Nakajima leaves a blank page of 24p as the end, ending the design with an unfinished gesture.
> "Art Manuscript Booklet"
At the end of the exhibition, we see Hideki Nakajima's past portfolio and catalogue, and the personal portfolio always has a certain self-summary meaning for designers. From his first collection, Revival, to Hideki Nakajima 1992-2012 , we can see his understanding of design at different times. Looking back on his past, he always looks forward to the future, but in his attitude towards design, his enthusiasm has not changed for a moment, even today's Nakajima has never stopped thinking about design.
Hideki Nakajima, 57, talks about "design", and he is still the same 17-year-old who saw Peter Indy in a record store. Savile's design is an uplifting teenager. "What is design?" Hideki Nakajima said, "I will spend my whole life thinking about this, otherwise, it will be tainting the design that saved my life, and the beautiful world that is sublime and in the name of design." "I hope that through Hideki Nakajima's exhibition, everyone can find their own answer to this question."