In 1981 the Japanese designer Ikko Tanaka made a poster for a performance of Nihon Buyo, classical Japanese dance, at UCLA’s Asian Performing Arts Institute. A geisha’s face is reduced to a few flat geometric blocks of color, the kind of shapes you’d expect from a Bauhaus classroom, and yet the whole thing reads instantly as Japanese. The design writer Steven Heller calls it probably Tanaka’s most iconic poster. It’s also a near perfect demonstration of what cross-cultural graphic design looks like when it works.
Plenty of design gets called “global” because it looks the same everywhere. The designers worth studying go the other way. They stand between two visual traditions and make something neither could have produced alone. Here are four we keep coming back to.
Ikko Tanaka, Tokyo
Tanaka (1930 to 2002) grew up with Japanese theater, woodblock prints and the decorative Rinpa school, and came of age as postwar Japan was absorbing American consumer culture and European modernism. Heller describes his style as having fused Modernist principles with Japanese tradition, and the fusion is the point. The grid and the flat sans serif came from the West. The economy, the theatrical restraint and the color sense did not.
He also helped shape one of the most influential identities of the late 20th century. With Kazuko Koike and Takashi Sugimoto, Tanaka conceptualized the graphic identity of Muji, the “no brand” retailer, and sat on its advisory board. That plain kraft-paper look, which now reads as generic minimalism, came out of a Japanese designer thinking hard about what to leave out. Cooper Hewitt in New York holds the Nihon Buyo poster in its collection. It’s worth looking up the full sheet, just over a meter tall, because the scale changes how bold it feels.
Henry Steiner, Hong Kong
Henry Steiner’s route is almost the reverse. Born in Vienna in 1934, he studied under Paul Rand at Yale and was sent to Hong Kong on an assignment in 1961. He decided not to go back to New York! The consultancy he started there became one of the defining design studios in Asia.
His signature, from early on, was deliberately bringing Chinese visual elements into a Western modernist structure. The banknotes he designed for Standard Chartered in Hong Kong used mythical Chinese creatures instead of portraits. His 1984 identity for HSBC is built from the St. Andrew’s cross, a nod to the Scottish roots of the bank’s founder, abstracted so cleanly that it sits as easily beside Chinese characters as beside English.
Steiner also wrote the book on the subject, literally. Cross-Cultural Design: Communicating in the Global Marketplace, with Ken Haas, came out in 1994. Two of his lines have stuck with us. “You don’t have to be an outsider but it helps.” And his argument that what makes design cross-cultural is context, shaped by the designer’s attitude, not a list of borrowed motifs. Living in Hong Kong, he said, gave him a living visual vocabulary he’d never have found in New York.
Ahn Sang-soo, Seoul
Ahn Sang-soo, born in 1952, works inside one script rather than between two, and that turns out to be its own kind of cross-cultural problem. Hangul, the Korean alphabet, is famously logical, but the typefaces Ahn inherited had settled into rigid, monotonous forms.
In 1985 Ahn released a typeface under his own name that started a long experiment in loosening Hangul from those habits, and later typefaces such as Madang pushed against the same stiffness. He taught typography for years at Hongik University in Seoul, served as vice president of the international design body Icograda from 1997 to 2001, and founded the Paju Typography Institute, an independent design school. In 2007 the city of Leipzig gave him the Gutenberg Prize, with jurors citing work that blends deep-rooted tradition with the language of our times. A Korean typographer winning a prize named for the father of Western printing. We like that very much!
Reza Abedini, Tehran
Reza Abedini, born in Tehran in 1967, works with Persian calligraphy the way a jazz musician works with a standard. The letterforms are recognizable, but he stretches and stacks them into posters and book covers that function as contemporary images first. Much of his work draws on Persian poetry, using the text itself as the picture rather than illustrating it.
He teaches graphic design and visual culture at the University of Tehran, and wrote New Visual Culture of Modern Iran, a book that highlights younger Iranian designers. In 2006 he received a principal Prince Claus Award from the Netherlands, given for reworking traditional knowledge into fresh contemporary design. His posters are a useful corrective for Western designers who think of calligraphy as ornament. In his hands it’s structure.
What they have in common
None of these four flattens one tradition into the other. Tanaka kept Japanese theater and borrowed the Bauhaus grid. Steiner kept the Swiss and American discipline and let Chinese symbols do the talking. Ahn and Abedini took their own scripts seriously enough to break them. The borrowed part is always the method, never the costume.
That’s the test we’d apply to any new work that claims to be “cross-cultural.” Does it understand both sides well enough to argue with them? If it only decorates, it isn’t.
For more from Japan’s postwar generation, see the graphic design of Kazumasa Nagai, a contemporary of Tanaka’s who is still working in his nineties. These posters for a rural Chinese harvest festival show another way of mixing folk imagery with modern type, and our visual culture glossary covers the terms behind it all.
