The exhibition Yasufumi Miyake “Moji wa Ikiteiru”
A typeface designer Yasuyuki Miyake’s personal exhibition titled “文字は生きている：Moji wa Ikiteiru, means The living letters” was held at Nerima Art Museum in Nerima ward, Tokyo. This exhibition had two parts, the one was themed “Letter Design” and the other was “Letter Art.”
He designed a lot of Japanese typefaces for more than fifty years, which were displayed in “Letter Design” room and showed 10 new typefaces as well. The famous round edged san-serif typeface family “Jun“, from Morisawa Library, and “JTC Win” family, from Nis Library were also included. The large letters on the presentation boards were hand-trimmed black papers. He seemed to think it was important to draw letters by hand. And he showed some lettering works that designed names of sports athletes, entertainers and famous persons for several kind of magazines.
Meanwhile, there were a lot of print art works, which looked like silk-screen printings, in the “Letter Art” room. He described several scenes with Kanji letters like 風: wind, 雷: thunder and Kanji letters had meaning of natural things. These letters were dynamic as if letters were alive and they were very unique and had humor feelings. I could feel the difference between these two parts ”static and dynamic.”
Left: Post card and Specimen sheet were provided at the gallery. Right: Nerima Art Museum
October 31st, 2008 at 12:17 am
When does Kanji (historically) started to “develop” new ideograms?
I mean, as it’s (probably) with Latin words – as it comes to meaning –, is there in Kanji – as it comes to form – a moment in history where Kanji ideorgams stopped to be “added”.
An example to make it clearer: the English word “capsule” (since it’s modern) needs Kana ideograms to be translated, since a Kanji single form does not exist.
If I am not wrong, another example is – right :=) – Tetsuwan Atomu, where a part of the name is Kanji and the other (probably “Atomu”) is Kana, since it’s a modern word, while Tetsuwan (”with the Iron arm”?) is Kanji, I seem to recall. It’s a thing which really intrigues me…
October 31st, 2008 at 12:18 am
Sorry, mistake: I meant *stopped*, not *started* [in my first line, above].
:=(
November 1st, 2008 at 1:41 am
That’s good question. But I can’t answer your question right now.
As you mentioned, we always use Kana to express the Latin word like English.
We don’t try to make new Kanji character to express the English word.
I can’t understand Chinese language, they seem to use Kanji to express the foreign word.
Japanese people also used to use Kanji characters as a phonetic equivalent to express latin word, for example a place name.
I’ve googled when Japanese peoplestarted to use Kana to express the Latin word. It seemed to start in the middle of Edo period, around 300 years ago.
I guess the people who lived in Edo period needed to distinguish the word came from foreign country and Japanese word using Kana characters.