Design Festa vol.47
The spring Design Festa (commonly known as “Desafes”) vol.47 — this time I visited on the opening day (May 12, 2018).
It’s a completely different kind of event from Art Fair Tokyo, but there were many young artists painting works on canvas in oil and acrylic, giving it something of an indie-market atmosphere.
Sensing the current of “otaku culture” — the kind you find at Comiket — flowing toward contemporary art, I met many young artists and came away inspired.
Hiroko Hokao
Design Festa is a huge event with some 5,000 small booths, each only about the width of a single tatami mat. Among them, one artist showing her work in an eye-catching blue wig was Hiroko Hokao.
As you can tell at a glance from her work, Hokao counts Hikari Shimoda among her favorite artists. Remarkably, she is just 19 years old.
She still has few opportunities to exhibit, but she says she intends to become far more active going forward.
She loves photographs that capture scenes of the city, and seems to draw on them as motifs as well.
She told me she isn’t sure how to price her work, so she takes the intriguing approach of “deciding the price through negotiation.”
Her work is still rough around the edges, but I hope that a generation like hers will help lift up the world of contemporary art.
