nooka x iceland design week

text by michael a. traverzo nooka recently teamed up with the designmarch, donating 25 zub skyblue zenh 20 for their vips. the designmarch is a four day event in its 2nd year organized by the iceland design center that takes place from the march 18- 21st. designmarch aims to spread design through iceland, exhibiting unique designs, works in progress as well as old favorites. check out the cool images that iceland design provided us with!

learn more about the designmarch here!

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tokyo this week

lobby of the MoT

art of kiyoshi KURODA

cut paper work of tomoko SHIYOYASU – mind-bogglingly awesome!

nooka!

the creepy work of junichi MORI

team nooka japan: yu YAMADA, myself and yuka SATO.

i am now on the first leg of a month-long business trip. i arrived in tokyo on friday so i would have the weekend to adjust to the jet-lag, but somehow, i'm exhausted today [waking up at 5am is probably the culprit!]. luckily i had 100% energy for my meeting with the PR agency we use here in Japan – got them up to speed on all the collab and event stuff in the US to find synergies and/or similar win-win scenarios relevant to the japan market. in particular, the more i talk about what's going on with the custom nookanooka shows around the world, the more i think we need to package it for a museum show somewhere [after budapest, we will have 50 nookanookas customized by local and international artists!]. curator friends: any ideas? connections with the cooper hewitt in nyc or the design museum in london [or any other ideas welcome]. i'll work the connections i have...

and on the same vein, i was happy to see an artist from the japan custom nookanooka show, atsuo OGAWA, featured in the annual show of new artists at the tokyo museum of contemporary art [known as the MoT, go figure]. the show was pretty amazing, i was blown away by some of the pieces, especially the ceramic work of katsuyo AOKI – glad i caught the show on the last day. you can learn more about the exhibition here. unfortunately, the catalog was sold out, so i had to snap some pictures of the library copy!

there was also a wonderful hussein chalayan retrospective which i also found inspiring. and to make it even more wonderful...they sell nooka in the MoT gift shop!

the newly renovated museum restaurant, content, is quite good – beautiful space, excellent service, but extremely overpriced for being in a municipally funded art museum.