Tokujin Yoshioka is an artist and designer originally from Japan’s Saga prefecture. Yoshioka works as a designer and has collaborated with numerous well-known companies throughout his career. His visual artworks often take the form of room installations, and have been collected by institutions including MoMA, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Yoshioka’s office and studio space is located in Daikanyamachō, Shibuya, Tokyo.

Yoshioka’s studio space looks incredibly clean, and certainly has a Zen-like vibe, in this image. The artist appears to be arranging paper components of a prototype or perhaps a larger, more complex artwork. The simplicity of the studio is visually parallel to a lot of the artist’s artworks. Yoshioka seems to enjoy allowing the viewer space within a work to contemplate one specific element, like the texture or material, without risking sensory overload.

I really love the big window pictured behind the designer in this photograph. While the interior of the space looks office-like, starkly lit, the large window opening up onto what appears to be a lush garden adds a wonderful feeling of warmth and calm. I’m curious about the objects that are lined up on the window sill behind the artist. They look to be random, decorative items – though perhaps they were earlier designs, or tools of some sort? Though the studio space gives off an air of utter simplicity, there’s definitely some more depth behind the scenes.

Many of Yoshioka’s commissioned designs take the form of designs for space – that is, designs for storefronts and commercial spaces. In 2010 he exhibited his installation Snow at the Mori Museum in Japan. The exhibition saw an entire space of the gallery blocked off with plexiglass and filled with whirling artificial snowflakes. 

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