‘My context is like junk, like Times Square. My competition is tough. My wish is that busy passers-by stop to look at my work, even for just a second. I must be conscious of time, because busy people are always thinking of other things. If someone looks at the poster for one second, it’s a success, but three seconds, five seconds, is perfect. I have to think how to get them to stop. This is very hard creativity’.
Eiko Ishioka
Eiko Ishioka (1938–2012) was one of the most important Japanese designers of the second half of the twentieth century. Educated at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (now Tokyo University of the Arts) and inspired by lectures by the world’s leading designers at the World Design Conference in Tokyo in 1960, she entered the world of design strongly convinced of its power and social significance. From the very beginning of her career, when she joined the Shiseido cosmetics advertising department in 1961, she developed her own creative practice through commissioned works.
In 1965, she received the prestigious Japan Advertising Artists Club Award for her poster series
Symposium: Discovery Today and became a member of the organisation. She was the first woman to receive this award and the first to be invited to join the Tokyo Art Directors Club.
In 1970, she founded her own studio, Eiko Ishioka Design Office, and went on to work as an independent art director, and graphic and set designer. For women artists around the world, the 1970s were a time of great change. Ishioka’s work in advertising was part of a broader movement to improve women’s social standing. Through the visual appeal of the language of advertising, she addressed women directly with messages meant to bolster their individuality and self-confidence.
For over ten years, Ishioka worked for the Japan’s Parco, creating media campaigns that included posters, TV and press advertisements, and other promotional materials. From 1974 onward, she also designed campaigns for the Kadokawa Shōten publishing house. In these collaborative projects, she crafted highly personal and expressive messages that reflected her immense creative energy. Her approach to art direction relied, above all, on excellent communication with the individual collaborators involved in the final project.
‘All authentic artists – fine or commercial – have desire. It’s the process that’s different, and the concept, of course. For me the media is my canvas and a talented collaborator, a photographer for example, is my paint’.
After moving to New York in the early 1980s, Ishioka worked as a set and costume designer for film, theatre and shows, as well as visual identities. This radical change, stemming from a desire to broaden her creative horizons, enabled her to reach global audiences. Her own publication, Eiko by Eiko (New York: Callaway Editions, 1983), proved to be an important and valuable step in her development. This retrospective of her work, not connected to any particular exhibition, led her to undertake projects in entirely new fields of art.
In the contemporary world of advertising, film and fashion, dominated by the latest digital technologies, Eiko Ishioka’s projects, based on traditional photographic and illustrative techniques, have lost none of their impact or originality. Her work remains vibrant and fascinating. It is a testament to the fact that true innovation always draws on a radical imagination.
Ishioka was neither a member of any avant-garde movement, nor did define herself in terms of feminism. And yet, she consistently challenged social and visual norms. By introducing social protest into advertising and consumer culture, she blurred the line between political engagement and market forces. Thus, her work can be seen as a form of critical design, and Ishioka herself as an important actor in the social and cultural changes of the second half of the twentieth century. Today, her posters and advertising campaigns are analysed through gender studies, postcolonial theory and social responsibility in advertising. They reveal the complex processes of constructing and negotiating identities in late capitalist societies, and her themes remain subjects of fierce debate and new interpretations.
Eiko Ishioka’s wide-ranging oeuvre includes advertising campaigns, publications, film and theatre sets and directing work, yet her first solo exhibition in Poland presents only her posters, now part of the canon of contemporary design.
All the works were produced using offset print and are part of the collection of the National Museum in Poznań, which acquired archival posters dating from 1968 to 1993.
