DIESEL, Italy’s premium casual brand, has been suggesting a way to enjoy a unique lifestyle through their concept “For Successful Living,” applying it not only to apparel, but to the gallery and café adjacent to the shop; and music projects. Especially, “Successful Living for DIESEL,” their Home Collection of furniture and lighting, has seen some very popular collaborations Italian brands, like Moroso (furniture), Foscarini (lighting), and Zucchi (textiles), all renowned for their superb design and quality.

Successful Living for DIESEL items designed by architects and interior designers have been on display in The Home Collection section of the basement floor of the concept store DIESEL Shibuya since it opened in August 2011. Following a series by the architectural design team KEIKO + MANABU, the current exhibition is DIGIT, by Yoshinori Tsutsumi.

Photo: Kanta Ushio

Tsutsumi is a Beijing-based architect born in 1978 in Fukuoka, Japan. After graduating from Tokyo University, he moved to Beijing and worked at SAKO Architects, before establishing his own office. Tsutsumi handles a range of architectural projects, from small stores to massive buildings. During his career, his architectural work has been shown in various venues, such as the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam and the Vitra Design Museum. In accordance with DIESEL and its emphasis on unique and original instead of cautious or conservative, Tsutsumi’s installation is a standout, and a superb match for the furniture on display.

Photo: Kanta Ushio

‘Showing things’: making goods and display a unified concept. In his current project, Yoshimasa Tsutsumi considers this idea of ‘showing things’ as a fundamental part of the installation he created for DIESEL. The project is not just a spatial installation; in a shop, it should also be effective as a display for the goods on sale. Thinking about both Space Performance and Effective Display at the same time has allowed Tsutsumi to create a super original way to display and enjoy merchandise.

Photo: Kanta Ushio

Usually, a room is constructed as something with firm boundaries, so product merchandise in stores generally becomes something you fix on its walls, limiting the ways to display goods to placing, hanging, or slinging something over something else. But if the wall is not hard, if it is, phantasmagoric or flexible, such display limitations disappear. For example, you can bury goods, like an ancient fossil buried in a layer of rock. By unifying the goods and their setting, Tsutsumi suggests the connections between an art installation and actual products in a shop. Instead of emphasizing each product independently, Tsutumi applies a reverse theory to his phantasmagoric wall: he buries all the goods in the wall and makes the wall fit the unique shape of each item:

Photo: Kanta Ushio

First I made a drawer as small as possible, and made a wall out of 10,000 of these small drawers. For reasons related to the limited term and cost, as well as weight r, I used paper for the front and slide system of each drawer. For the front, I used a piece of 40mm paper and for the slide system, I found 35mm was the best.” (quoted from Tutsumi’s concept of the DIESEL installation).

Photo: Kanta Ushio

By pulling these tiny drawers in and out, Tsutsumi was able to represent a relief map with a texture of inlay and erosion. Each product in the collection was buried in the “wall” in a way that best suited its shape and characteristics. “DIGIT,” the title of the installation, was a word created by Tsutsumi that combines the “digital” in the pixilation that each drawer he created with “Dig it,” which expresses the function of the wall. How and what would you bury in this wall? It would be great exercise pulling the drawer of your imagination in and out.

DIGIT by Yoshimasa Tsutsumi
Date: August 18th, 2012 – February 17th, 2013
Opening Hour: 11:30-21:00
Holidays: non-regular holiday
Place: DIESEL ART GALLERY
Address: cocoti B1F, 1-23-16, Shibuya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo
Tel: +81 03-6427-5955
http://www.diesel.co.jp/art