Contemporary Japanese Posters

The most complete volume on the subject in any language Japanese graphic design has been researched and published in Italy up to the first decade of the new millennium, but there is a gap from then to today.

This research aims at filling that gap considering the first two decades of the new millennium, covering on one side the past, in the names of important recognized masters, and on the other side exploring new names and trends. The volume includes 85 graphic designers and 756 posters. It is the most complete volume on the subject in any language.

Japanese contemporary posters are considered to have started in the mid 50’s, after the Second World War and following a period of depression, post-militarism, and post-autarchy. The new expressive mode was fuelled by stimuli coming from abroad, but it was also a chance to reinterpret traditional themes and colours, bringing them into modernity in refreshing and successful ways.

Since the post-war period, Japan has seen a rapid evolution in the arts: painting, architecture, sculpture, graphics, theatre, music, and cinema. Influences, assimilations, denials, transformations, new creative processes gave rise to a vast quantity of cultural and artistic movements. In this maze of expressive forms, graphic design is a precious tool for tracing and following the thread of national creativity and the more or less intense permanence of traditional aesthetic sensibility in the new forms taken.

Over half a century after the inception of graphics and with the coming Olympic Games taking place now in 2021, this volume aims at taking a wide view at the trends and aesthetic shifts that can be traced in the development of graphic design in Japan.