Tokujin Yoshioka was born in Saga, Japan, in 1967 and graduated from the Kuwasawa Design School in Tokyo in 1988. Immediately after that, he began important collaborations with Shiro Kuramata and Issey Miyake before founding his Tokyo-based studio, Tokujin Yoshioka Inc., in 2000. As a designer and creative artist working in architecture, installations and art, Tokujin Yoshioka's work is marked by a poetic and experimental approach that finds inspiration in Japanese culture and nature-related themes. His works are often characterised by transparent and reflective materials complemented by light and spatial interaction, transcending the concept of form and resulting from careful aesthetic and technological research. This premise gave rise to projects like the Transparent Japanese House (2002), later complemented in 2015 by the Kou-an Glass teahouse, a small entirely-glass pavilion inspired by the tea ceremony installed at the Shogunzuka temple in Kyoto. Similarly, in 2013 he designed Rainbow Church, a sensory installation presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. Glass is a recurring material in Yoshioka's work, as evidenced by the Water Block bench series from 2002 or the furniture collection produced by Glas Italia, including the Prism Glass Chair with armrests, the Prism Glass wardrobe, the Prism Partition screen and the Prism Mirror Table and the Luminous and Fountain coffee tables.
Tokujin Yoshioka boasts prestigious collaborations (BMW, Cartier, Driade, Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Lexus, Kartell, Moroso, Swarovski) that have led to the creation of design items and works of art that are now in the permanent collections of museums all over the world, including MoMA in New York, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Vitra Design Museum and the Montreal Museum of Modern Art. His numerous collaborations include Desalto (the hexagonal Hexagon coffee tables in marble and steel variations with crystal and the Element line of tables) and Moroso (including Moon, a polyethene armchair with metallic lacquer finish and Panna Chair armchair with removable fabric cover). With Mutina, whose team he joined in 2010, he designed Phenomenon, a rich collection of porcelain stoneware wall tiles in unusual formats that evoke the textures of natural materials.
Tokujin Yoshioka has received many important awards, including Design Miami - Designer of Year in 2007; Wallpaper Design Awards Best furniture designer in 2008; the Elle Deco International Design Award - Designer of Year in 2009 and 2016; Maison & Objet - Creator of the Year 2012. In 2019, he designed the torch for the Tokyo 2022 Olympic Games. Many publications cover Tokujin Yoshioka's work, including monographs by Phaidon (2006) and Rizzoli (2010). Newsweek magazine named him among the one hundred most respected Japanese personalities in the world.
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