発見, hakken: a finding. This is a record of what one designer notices in a week.

I grew up beside the Arakawa, in Adachi, and spent five years in a Ginza studio drawing identities for companies you have used without once thinking about them. That work teaches you to read a city as a page. A vending machine is set type. A rice bag is a packaging problem somebody solved in the eighties and nobody has improved on since. A good deal of the best design in Japan is like that: already in the street, unsigned, waiting to be looked at properly.

So this magazine watches the street as well as the feed. Around fifty sources come in through the day, ten of them Japanese, and what the world's studios are arguing about is counted and plotted so you can watch it move. Every third day I write about one thing I actually stood in front of.

What you get for a story is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the way out to the people who reported it. Never the article itself, and never the photograph as though it were ours. A story written in Japanese stays in Japanese here, headline and excerpt both, because that is how its author set it down.

Everything is also published in Japanese at hakkenmag.com/ja/.

— Ren Arakawa, Tokyo

← Hakken Archive

Surface

Tiffany Shlain Debuts “If These Walls Could Talk: Women of the Hotel Chelsea”

October 6

On October 1, Tiffany Shlain added a new chapter to the Hotel Chelsea's storied artistic history. The artist, Emmy-nominated filmmaker, and bestselling author celebrated the debut of If "These Walls…

Read at Surface ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

Latest

Tiffany Shlain Debuts “If These Walls Could Talk: Women of the Hotel Chelsea”

More from Surface on Hakken

Tarini Sethi Turns Stainless Steel Into a Walk-Through Utopia for Frieze Sculpture Surface

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Positions Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock as Artistic Peers, and Other News. Surface

The Perspective and Process of Artist Asher Liftin Surface

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Redesigned Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden Reopens, and Other News. Surface

The Mise-en-Scène of Thom Browne’s September Releases Surface

Claire Oliver Gallery Exhibited Three Puerto Rican Artists For The Atlanta Art Fair Surface