MangoVine - Design Festa at Tokyo Big Sight - Amazing Variety of Artist Work

17 May, 2009
Sunday

With so many exhibitors and their work to see at the 29th Design Festa, held at Tokyo Big Sight, it was hard to find a balance between covering as much as possible and spending enough quality time at the stalls we found interesting.

Nevertheless, here are my highlights. They cover the range of creative work that I personally found interesting, but the diversity of styles at the Design Festa were more widespread.

In the main entrance hall, we came across the first illustrator that we liked who works under the name Funpy. His work was quite similar to the popularised vector character styles seen all over the illustrated web, but his made-up cityscape poster featuring both Seoul and Tokyo won us over and we asked him for a signed copy of it.

Ilustration seemed to be the single most common creative skill that we saw, and most artists were intent on demonstrating their abilities there and then.

Having no walls to draw against, this chap utilised a stock of transparent umbrellas, great eye candy if you happen to check the sky during daytime showers.

Also common were tonnes of stalls displaying and selling all manner of models and styles, from papercraft to wood, resin to plastic and other similar materials.

Themes easily included fantasy as well as distorted reality and portrayed stylised characters, in addition to cute dioramas and realistic, creatively depicted insects.

Dolls and fashion seemed to go hand-in-hand with some exhibitors appearing to display and sell clothes purely for one sixteenth scale figures and others selling full size clothes modelled by dolls.

Or modeled by dedicated exhibitors living the lifestyle.

I couldn't work out what this full-size baby doll was for however. It had the tail end of a maggot!

This couple of fetish ladies were also popular photo subjects for some reason, and I suppose the event wouldn't have been complete without exhibitors like them.

I also came across one guy who made his own steampunk accessories, which weren't cheap.

These decorative bottles of mini skeletons were also highly popular. The exhibitor displayed several shelves full of these and it was difficult to get a good, close-up look at them because of the crowd.

A tank of water contained these flower items swirling around. They looked elegant, but we had no idea what they were for. The space wasn't manned either.

There were no bonsai growers at the Design Festa, but there was one place that sold really creatively, detailed plant dioramas and terrariums. I found them fascinating since I've been wanting to put together my own, and this stall provided plenty of ideas with its combination of plants, moss, wood, bark and mini figures of people.

A couple of horror effects exhibitors were present too. One simply displayed model heads of gruesome, graphic nature whilst the other actually applied specialist horror make-up on willing participants.

More photos of the exhibitors at the Design Festa vol.29 on Flickr

Visit the Design Festa website

This entry posted in : Art. Culture. Entertainment. Events. Japan.

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Design Festa at Tokyo Big Sight - Amazing Variety of Artist Work

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