Eiko Ishioka. Who Am I?

The Eiko Ishioka exhibition is the first presentation in Poland of one of the icons of Japanese design, the most important graphic designer from the Land of the Rising Sun. From her rich body of work, which includes advertising campaigns, publishing projects, theatre and film set designs, and direction, this year's exhibition at the Manggha Museum will present posters only.

Some 80 posters belonging today to the canon of contemporary graphic design in Japan will be shown. Among them are those created for the PARCO promotional campaigns: Don’t stare at the nude, be naked (1975), Girls, be Ambitious! (1975), Nightingale Sings for No One but Herself (1976), Ah, Our Roots! (1977), My dear Superstar (1978), Dressed to kill and no place to go (1980), and the illustrative series Very Parco (1983).

The exhibition will also include works for Issey Miyake fashion shows, advertising posters for the Japanese companies Shiseido and Diana, and posters promoting the publishing house Kadokawa Shoten. The display will be completed by posters for iconic films: Innocent (dir. Luchino Visconti), Koyaanisqatsi (dir. Godfrey Reggio), Apocalypse Now, and Dracula (dir. Francis Ford Coppola).

The posters created by art director Eiko Ishioka are meticulously conceived compositions, most often made using photography, but also illustrative works, for which she invited outstanding artists to collaborate. The posters on display reveal the creative energy invested in each work, carrying strong, personal messages from their author.

All the works come from the collection of the Poster and Design Gallery of the National Museum in Poznań, which acquired archival copies from the years 1968–1993.

Eiko Ishioka (1938–2012)

belongs to the circle of outstanding figures of Japanese design, alongside, among others, Shigeo Fukuda, Yusaku Kamekura, Kazumasa Nagai, Kōichi Satō, Ikko Tanaka, Tadanori Yokoo, and Kenya Hara, and is the only woman artist in the field of graphic design to have achieved international success in this field.

After graduating from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Ishioka attended lectures at the international WoDeCo (World Design Conference) in Tokyo in 1960. A year later she joined the advertising department of the cosmetics company Shiseido. In 1965, as the first woman, she received the Japan Advertising Artists Club Award. Five years later she founded her own design studio, Eiko Ishioka Design Office, and began working as an independent designer and art director. She played a major role in shaping the iconography of Japanese advertising posters in the 1970s and 1980s.

From 1973 she was involved in designing and producing supporting materials, including posters, press advertisements, and television programmes for the PARCO department stores. As art director of advertising campaigns, she helped shape the image of a company with which she fully identified. In her works she asked the question “What is PARCO?”, and through advertising posters she created an image of the contemporary woman in Japan.

In the mid-1970s she also prepared a promotional campaign for the publishing house Kadokawa Shoten under the slogan Woman! Turn off your TV sets!. She designed sets, posters, and publications accompanying the Issey Miyake and Twelve Black Women fashion show. She also prepared a series of posters and the set design for the exhibition Leni Riefenstahl: Nuba in 1980 at the Seibu Art Museum.

In 1980 she moved to New York as an already recognised advertising artist who was nonetheless constantly going beyond the boundaries of that field. Since then she has realised many projects in theatre and film design, and designed album covers, including for Miles Davis and Björk. She is the author of iconic posters for the films Innocent directed by Luchino Visconti…