I first heard the name Kohei Sugiura in a classroom at IDC, from my professor Kirti Trivedi (or KT which was what everybody called him). KT often spoke of Sugiura and suggested that he might be one of the greatest designers (and thinkers about design). He showed us his work, through slides and some of his actual designs (books and other artifacts). I remember being blown away by some of Sugiura’s ideas and implementation. There was the book on a calligraphy exhibition—the cover of which had two calligraphic strokes, one printed and another actually drawn by the artist. It allowed us, the viewers, to viscerally experience both the richness of a calligraphic stroke, and what was lost when it was printed. And yes, it also made each of these books a unique expression of the artist’s craft.
And then there was the book about the cosmos: “Summa Cosmographica” (Zen uchuu shi), published in 1979, designed with Seigow Matsuoka. The cover, the pages, were all black, with white text because the universe is mostly dark. And just as the universe is full of things so was the book. This was a book meant to be discovered and explored, just like the universe we live in.
No part of the book went unexamined or un-designed. These included the margins, the edges, which sometimes would surprise you with flip-book style animations, and other times act as marginalia where ideas, important but incidental, could be explored. And then there was the side view of the pages. If you just gently bent the pages one way you would see an image of the Andromeda galaxy and if bent the other way you would see Flamsteed’s chart of the constellations.
Image courtsey artscape.jp
Just think about it for a second. Sugiura was designing what you see when you look at the pages side of the book. I had heard of people designing the cover and even the the back cover. But the sides where you just see a cross section of the pages? Who designs that? Who even thinks of designing that? Well, guess what, Sugiura did! (One also needs to marvel at the precision in cutting this required – because a shift of a millimeter would destroy the effect.)
And in another project he showed how one could creatively think of a spine of a book —a space typically reserved for a title written vertically (or horizontally, if the book were thick enough). For a set of collected works, Céline in sixteen volumes and ‘Collected Works of the German Romantic School’ by Kokusho Kankokai in sixteen, Sugiura printed images across the spines, that would be make sense only when you had the entire set (or at least a bulk of it). The idea was that, as the volumes collected an image or design would become apparent. And, this was design for the long haul, and some of these projects took years to come to fruition. For instance the Leibniz volumes came out between 1988 and 1999, and the Céline between 1978 and 2003. So this was a painting rendered in slow motion, in at least one case, for over almost a quarter of a century.
Image courtsey artscape.jp
At some level the idea was simple: a book has six sides, and a designer might use all of them. It were simple ideas like these that Sugiura took to the extreme and that was what set him apart.
KT showed us these examples over 35 years ago, and though lots of details have fallen through the cracks of memory, the impact of seeing this singular vision of a designer as a creator, of the entire artifact, has never left me.
In 2021, Muashashino Art University released a series of YouTube videos in Japanese based on a lecture series given to designers in Tokyo, walking through his own design philosophy and methods, work by work. It has been available in Japanese on the Sugiura Kohei Design Archive at Musashino Art University. KT arranged to have the whole series of Japanese videos translated into English, dubbed the original videos with narration in English, with English text laid over the Japanese without disturbing Sugiura’s original composition. This is an amazing resource introducing the world to an amazing designer. There are 43 videos in the series so far and they are worth digging into. The final one will be released on September 8, timed to coincide with a talk by Prof Tadanori Nagasawa on ‘Kohei Sugiura and Asian Design’ at the India International Centre in Delhi.
The entire set of videos can be accessed at: youtube.com/@SugiuraCosmos
KT has also built something permanent. Sri Aurobindo Kala Sangam in Puducherry opened last month, and a collection of Sugiura’s work is installed there at Villa Appavou: books, posters, calendars, publications and information diagrams from six decades, which the center describes as the only public display of Sugiura’s works in in the world, outside Japan. There are also six week-long workshops there on Sugiura’s design methodology between October and March, on things like the book as a three-dimensional object, variation programs, and information diagrams. Details are at sriaurobindokalasangam.org.
Finally a note of gratitude to KT: He introduced me to Sugiura and to how Indian temple architecture understood the idea of fractals, hundreds of years before Mandelbrot. One of my most joyous moments in the past year was being able to meet him, in person, in Bangalore, last December, at Kirti Kriti, an exhibition of KT’s career. I also took this opportunity to thank him and gave him a couple of my ambigrams —one original of his name and the other a classic (good-evil as figure and ground). So, it felt right to make one for this occasion too. Kohei and Sugiura, as two separate words, below.
