A visit to the Japan House gallery in Los Angeles requires navigating a flashy, raucous, multi-story tourist mall called Hollywood & Highland—the local version of Times Square—to reach a glassy, second-floor storefront. But just over the threshold is another world, where delicate, Zen-like design objects occupy a serene, white minimalist retail shop, leading into a spacious gallery at the rear. The contrast with the mall’s Vegas-like glitz and bustle is extreme, but also perversely well suited to the gallery’s current show: Sou Fujimoto: Futures of the Future (on view through December 12, 2018).
After all, the Japanese architect Fujimoto is known for his own unexpected juxtapositions. He began his career investigating the architecture of ordinary household objects: a kitchen-sink drain screen, a textured scrub sponge, bars of staples, matchboxes, crumpled paper or cellophane, and others. Within these “environments,” he placed tiny, white scale figures, altering our perception. Suddenly, a few carefully composed potato chips turned into deep-walled canyons; or a small, overturned, expandable-mesh plastic sack (packaging designed for a single fragile piece of fruit) became a soaring, almost religious, space for a minuscule human figure.
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