From Surge to Burst: Japan’s Frenetic Years

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Japan’s bubble economy of the 1980s called forth experimentation in design and everyday products, as shown in Things, Spaces, Interactions.

This programme is centred on films made in Japan during that era when filmmakers asserted their creative responses to these prosperous times with awe, delirium, and disquiet—seen in films such as The Adventure of Denchu-Kozo by Shinya Tsukamoto and Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo. These films, like Godzilla reaching the end of the road, foreshadowed the lost decade that followed the bubble burst.

Around the same time, art director Eiko Ishioka raised the question ‘Can West Wear East?’ in her provocative PARCO advertising campaign. Western filmmakers Paul Schrader and Wim Wenders each made their own ‘Japanese films’—Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters and Tokyo-Ga—from an outsider’s perspective that attempts to make sense of the culture that has inspired many across the globe.