Dale Chihuly is an American glass artist and entrepreneur. He is well known in the field of blown glass, "moving it into the realm of large-scale sculpture".
Yasumasa Morimura is a contemporary Japanese performance and appropriation artist whose work encompasses photography, film, and live performance. He is known for his reinterpretation of recognizable artworks and figures from art history, history, and mass media through his adoption of personas that transcend national, ethnic, gendered, and racial boundaries. Across his photographic and performative series, Morimura's works explore a number of interconnected themes, including: the nature of identity and its ability to undergo change, postcolonialism, authorship, and the Western view of Japan – and Asia, more broadly – as feminine.
Mario Bellini is an Italian architect and designer. After graduating from the Polytechnic University of Milan in 1959, Bellini pursued a career as an architect, exhibition designer, product designer, and furniture designer during the Italian economic boom of the late 20th century. Bellini has received several accolades in a variety of design fields, including eight Compasso d'Oro awards and the Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Triennale di Milano. In 2019, the Italian President of the Chamber of Deputies, Roberto Fico, awarded Bellini a career medal in recognition of his contributions to Italian architecture and design.
Gaetano Pesce was an Italian architect and a design pioneer of the 20th century. Pesce was born in La Spezia in 1939, and he grew up in Padua and Florence. During his 50-year career, Pesce worked as an architect, urban planner, and industrial designer. His outlook is considered broad and humanistic, and his work is characterized by an inventive use of color and materials, asserting connections between the individual and society, through art, architecture, and design to reappraise mid-twentieth-century modern life.
The Campana Brothers, consisting of Humberto Campana and Fernando Campana (1961–2022) are Brazilian furniture designers.
A design museum is a museum with a focus on product, industrial, graphic, fashion and architectural design. Many design museums were founded as museums for applied arts or decorative arts and started only in the late 20th century to collect design.
James Irvine was a British industrial designer who created furniture and product designs for many well known companies and brands such as Artemide, B&B Italia, Cappellini, Foscarini, Ikea, Magis, Muji, Thonet, and WMF. He once described the product designer's job as “the work of an unknown hero.”
The Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum is a museum of art located in Ueno Park, Tokyo, Japan. It is one of Japan's many museums which are supported by a prefectural government. The first public art museum in Japan, it opened in 1926 as the Tokyo Prefectural Art Museum and was renamed in 1943 after Tokyo became a metropolitan prefecture. The museum's current building was constructed in 1975 and designed by modernist architect Kunio Maekawa, remaining one his most well-known works today.
Tsubasa Kato is a Japanese contemporary artist. He made his debut at the "Roppongi Crossing 2010" exhibition at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo and received the Kengo Kuma Prize, after earning M.F.A from the Tokyo University of the Arts. In 2015, he received a fellowship from the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan Government and participated in Japan-US Exchange Friendship Program in the Arts as Visitor Research Scholar of University of Washington in Seattle for two years. Since 2007, he is known for his Pull and Raise project.
Joris Hendricus Laarman is a Dutch designer, artist, furniture maker, and entrepreneur best known for his experimental designs inspired by emerging technologies. Laarman's projects are a blend of technology, art and design, with a focus on the potential of 3D printing. Major projects include 3D-printed stainless-steel bridge in Amsterdam, which showcases the potential for creating adaptive, lightweight, and uniquely designed structures using 3D printing. Laarman has also explored furniture design, including the 'Bone' series which used 3D-optimization software to achieve optimal construction. The designer's work often evokes a futuristic feel while nodding to historical art movements, exemplified by pieces like his "Digital Matter" series. When Laarman speaks about his work he discussed the implications and responsibilities that come with breakthrough technologies.
Pyuupiru (ピュ〜ぴる) is a Japanese artist born in Tokyo, where she is currently living and working. Her art work deals with her body as well as gender. She also works with mediums such as costume design, writing, and character design.
Firoz Mahmud is a Bangladeshi visual artist based in Japan. He was the first Bangladeshi fellow artist in research at Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Mahmud's work has been exhibited at the following biennales: Sharjah Biennale, the first Bangkok Art Biennale, at the Dhaka Art Summit, Setouchi Triennale (BDP), the first Aichi Triennial, the Congo Biennale, the first Lahore Biennale, the Cairo Biennale, the Echigo-Tsumari Triennial, and the Asian Biennale.
Grazia Varisco is an Italian visual artist and designer.
Ranbir Singh Bisht (1928–1998) was an Indian painter and the Principal of the College of Fine Arts, Lucknow University. Born in 1928 at Landsdowne in Garhwal, in the present day Indian state of Uttarakhand, he secured Drawing Teacher's Training Certificate and Diploma in Fine Arts from the Government College of Art and Craft, Lucknow. He conducted many solo shows in a number of Indian cities besides a show in New York and participated in group shows in Frankfurt and Tokyo. He was also a participant of the 4th Triennale at New Delhi in 1972.
Junco Sato Pollack is a textile artist. As a native of Japan, having lived in the United States for more than 30 years, she aims to combine Eastern and Western influences in her art and create work that has a modernist, minimal design.
Vincent Fournier is a French artist and photographer. His works explore questions of science fiction, utopian stories ,and different mythologies of the future such as the space adventure, humanoid robots, utopian architectures, and the technological transformation of the living. His vision is nourished by childhood memories, including visits to the Palais de la Découverte, which evoke the "scientific wonder". While photography remains his preferred medium, 3D printing, video and installations sometimes accompany certain projects. Vincent Fournier's images are put in tension by oppositions that disturb our gaze: reality/fiction, logic/absurdity, past/future, magic/science, natural/artificial. He explores futuristic fiction and discovers in our present, or in the past, "glimpse of the future". After graduating in sociology and visual arts, he studied at the École nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles and obtained his diploma in 1997.
Hiroko Sato-Pijanowski is a Japanese jewelry designer, artist, author and educator. Sato-Pijanowski is credited with introducing Japanese materials and techniques to American metal working. She is based in Yokohama in Kantō, Japan.
Oki Sato is a Japanese architect, designer, and the founder of the Nendo design studio. He was born in Toronto, Canada, attended Waseda University in Tokyo and graduated in 2002 with a Masters of Arts degree in architecture. He subsequently founded Nendo in his parents garage in Tokyo. He has said that "Design is about making decisions. A person can only make a certain amount of decisions each day, [i]t's really important to keep your mind empty."
The 2020 Summer Olympics cauldron was made for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Japan. In fact, there were two cauldrons, one inside the Olympic Stadium that was used only at the and the actual one, which was located on Tokyo's new waterfront on Ariake West Canal, which was lit after the Opening Ceremony and remained alight throughout the Games. The cauldron was designed by Canadian-Japanese designer Oki Sato, who attended Waseda University, the same university as Yoshinori Sakai, the cauldron-lighter in 1964. The steps to reach the cauldron, symbolising Mount Fuji, were "designed to evoke the image of a blooming sakura flower."
Maria Cristina Didero is an Italian curator, historian, author, and design scholar. She is curatorial director for Design Miami. Didero is quoted as saying that, "design is all about people, not about chairs."
