The Japanese Kenya Hara is one of the most important designers. His work and his design philosophy are known and appreciated worldwide thanks to numerous lectures and publications. With "Draw", his latest book, he now opens up his "workshop" for the first time and provides an insight into the graphic creation processes of his designs.
Hara is active in many areas of design. He has been art director at Muji since 2001 and designed the programs for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano. He also created, among many other design projects, the official posters for EXPO 2005 in Aichi, the orientation system for Umeda Hospital, the corporate design of the Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum and the new design for the Matsuya department store in Ginza. In 2008, Hara collaborated with the fashion label Kenzo for the men's perfume Kenzo Power, to name just a few of the tasks from his rich oeuvre. The selected examples are correspondingly diverse, as the process of sketching and drawing by hand has always played an important role for him.
This began in the early days of his career: After studying at Musashimo Art University, he was eager to join Eiko Ishioka's studio. In the early 1980s, she was not only an outstanding figure for fashion and commercial advertising in Japan, but apparently also a relentless teacher who was highly appreciated by Hara. She attached great importance to illustration, which was not without consequences for him. For example, "Draw" begins with elaborate, sometimes highly complex ornaments - valuable finger exercises for his later designs. But there are also numerous variants for labels and bottles as well as model drawings for exhibition buildings and entire areas of houses. Some of the ideas shown are astonishing, but above all they give an idea of the imaginative creative process that ultimately led to iconic results. For Kenya Hara, this book is intended to inspire the next generation of creatives and can certainly be seen as a plea for a return to analog processes in design. Sketching and drawing by hand can effectively promote and complement the usual design work on the computer, as "Draw" convincingly proves.
Text: Herbert Lechner
Kenya Hara: Draw
Lars Müller Verlag, 2025
352 pages with around 720 illustrations. Text in English
ISBN: 978-3-03778-761-8
60,- Euro
