Tokujin Yoshioka, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Japanese artist is playing with light in all the right ways–this time on a colossal scale. The centerpiece of Yoshioka’s Rainbow Church is a tall, slender installation that’s 40 feet tall and contains 500 crystal prisms. Light refracts through the prisms, throwing rainbow hues on the adjacent walls for a stained glass effect without the stained glass. The spare aesthetic doesn’t make it easily apparent, but Rainbow Church is influenced by an experience from his early 20s, when he visited Henri Matisse’s Rosaire Chapel in Vence, France. “I had a mysterious experience of being filled with overwhelming light and vibrant colors,” the artist says in a press release. “A dream to build architecture like this chapel came up to me strongly.” In a departure from the tangible materials he’s used in the past–foil for chairs, feathers for a snow-themed art installation–he’s building with light, the most ephemeral material of all.
Tokujin Yoshioka was born in Japan in 1967 and, after having studied at length with Shiro Kuramata and Issey Miyake, in 2000 set up his studio in Tokyo. His partnership with Issey Miyake has been in existence for over twenty years. Tokujin Yoshioka has taken part in a number of projects by the fashion designer, designing Issey Miyake and A-POC stores and producing the installation entitled Issey Miyake Making Things for the Cartier foundation in Paris. Tokujin Yoshioka has received a number of awards and his works are displayed in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein (Basel) and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. For more information or to get in touch with the rtist, follow also the link below.
