Individuality in the Service of Design

On the phone from her New York apartment, Eiko Ishioka answers a question with a question. “How do you look at my world?” she asks.

Ishioka, an artist-designer whose work ranges from advertising to art films, Hollywood costumes to installation art, says the question is central to all her work.

Throughout her career, her purpose has been to coax--often jolt--people out of their preconceived perspectives. “You have to examine how you are looking at me and what values you bring,” she said. “It is perhaps more important than the reality [of what] you are looking at.”

Most recently, what you may have been looking at were the skinned-alive armored characters in “The Cell,” or any of that film’s dozens of other exotic and detailed costumes. Or the similarly radical designs in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Ishioka was also responsible for the surreal and beautiful production design of Paul Schrader’s art film “Mishima,” and the vibrant Chinese red sets of David Henry Hwang’s play “M. Butterfly” on Broadway.

All of that work and more--17 years’ worth--is captured in a new book, “Eiko on Stage,” which will be a jumping-off point for Ishioka when she lectures this week at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. In the introduction to the book, Coppola provides one answer to the question of how one might look at Ishioka’s world: “Beauty itself,” he writes, “is her medium.”

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If Ishioka’s handling of beauty is unconventional, it is perhaps because she comes from a family with unconventional values. She was born in Tokyo in the war years (she won’t say when), the eldest of four children. Some of her earliest memories are of bombed-out buildings and hunger. Her family’s fortunes turned after the war, when her father rose to some prominence as a commercial graphic designer. Her mother was a frustrated novelist-turned-housewife.

“I grew up under very artistic circumstances,” said Ishioka. “When I was 3, I showed special talent for drawing. And because my mother couldn’t be a creator--because her mother told her to find a husband instead--my parents spoiled me. They encouraged me to think about myself and find my voice. This characteristic helps me be an artist, but it also makes it hard to be part of the team. My ‘look at me-me-me-personality’ is still this way.”

Not surprisingly, Ishioka rejected Japanese cultural expectations and headed for a career, using the design department at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1957 as her launching pad. There she made friends with fashion designer-to-be Issey Miyake, her classmate.

In 1961, she joined the advertising division of Japan’s largest cosmetics company, Shiseido. When she won Japan’s most prestigious advertising award four years later, she was not entirely prepared for the firestorm. It was the first time a woman had won. “I’ll never forget one man, a very talented designer, said he envied me because I was a woman and that my name would not be famous if I were not a woman,” she said. “This made me strong. It made me angry.”

Ishioka didn’t just get even, she got manipulative, and toward a positive end from her perspective. Throughout the ‘70s, she served as chief art director for a chain of upscale Japanese department stores called Parco. Ishioka said Parco was built on the philosophy that Japan’s young professionals had no identity and needed to establish their sense of values in connection with the rest of the world, particularly the West.

Ishioka responded by not once placing a Parco product in her ads. She essentially innovated what Americans would come to know as the Benetton ad.

Text was scare or missing altogether. The images were of people, mostly women, from foreign lands in vibrant native dress--or in nothing at all. “Don’t stare at the nude; be naked” read one ad. Ishioka’s point was to “put a stop to offensive voyeurism. . . . Undressing the mind and body is fashionable.” Another of her bold campaigns featured a close-up of a black woman pulling down the neckline of her red dress with her eyes shut in ecstasy, alongside the simple imperative: “Girls, be ambitious!”

“Commercial work’s purpose is to sell merchandise,” wrote sculptor Isamu Noguchi of Ishioka in her first book, “Eiko by Eiko.” “But Eiko used it to fight a battle, to move a message into society--to subvert consumerism.”

By the end of her tenure at Parco in 1980, Ishioka had broken into stage design and direction, and she had opened her own design studio. That same year, she took a long vacation in the United States, and she would continue to move back and forth between the U.S. and Japan until 1991, when she settled permanently in New York City.

What she found here at first was a new cause. She had thought the love affair between the Japanese and Americans was mutual. In fact, she was shocked to find that while American popular culture was “adored” in Japan, Americans appeared to have no interest in anything Japanese other than imperial tea ceremonies, kimonos and bonsai trees.

“Kimonos, beautiful gardens are dreams. They’re illusions,” she said. “If we can’t put our modern culture into people’s minds, then how can we survive?”

In 1982, she gave a talk at the Japan Society in Manhattan. Attended by such major forces in the arts as Susan Sontag and Noguchi, her lecture attacked Japanese romanticism in the United States and created a wave of excitement. Out of it came “Eiko by Eiko,” the summation of her first 20 years of work and a classic for design students. When director Tarsem hired her for “The Cell,” which was released in August, he told her that when he was in art school, “ ‘Eiko by Eiko’ was [our] Bible and Ishioka was [our] goddess.”

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“The Cell” occupies a large part of the new book, “Eiko on Stage,” which also covers eight other Hollywood, Broadway and opera projects to which Ishioka contributed visual elements. Her ambition to open the eyes of the American and European mainstream to the possibilities and relevance of a contemporary Japanese sensibility is apparent on every page.

“She retains a strong Asian sensibility and definitely holds an honored place within the school of contemporary avant-garde artists in Japan,” wrote Coppola in his introduction, “but all the same she also brings to all her work a Western sophistication.”

And in fact, her strongest design message may be her individuality--that and a strong sense of globalization. “I do not want to carry Japan always,” she says. “I don’t want anybody to talk about my designs as Japanese. When I read this word, I feel something strange. It puts a foot on my shoulder. I am not an ambassador for Japanese culture. I want to be an ambassador for Eiko’s planet.”

And how does she define that planet? She says she chooses all her projects carefully, paying close attention to how much freedom the director will give her. “I want the visual elements to be more than wallpaper,” she says. “I want them to be part of the narrative--as important as the script or the acting.”

Only when a director shares this view and is willing to see things her way is Ishioka inclined to accept. Her choices have also definitely tended to cross boundaries of style, form and content.

For renowned German director Werner Herzog’s production of “Chushingura” in 1997--a Western-style opera based on a true Japanese legend--Ishioka intentionally clashed cultures by designing a minimalist set of three leaning monoliths, and then filling the stage with modern-day golfers and samurai. The next year, she created the sets and costumes for an elaborate revisioning of the “Ring” Cycle for the Netherlands Opera, with French director Pierre Audi at the helm. For her art installation meant to define Tokyo to the U.S., she created a performance space (seen at MOCA in 1986) that mixed the style of a traditional Japanese lunch box with new media.

Her need for aesthetic independence contributed to her decision to reject all of the many feature film offers she received in the seven years between winning the Academy Award for her costumes in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” and Tarsem’s invitation for “The Cell.”

Basing her choices on the chemistry of the team more than on the project’s medium, Ishioka dismisses the notion that she was drawn to “The Cell” because it--as with the majority of her stage projects in “Eiko on Stage”--contains sadomasochistic ideas and imagery. She says that unlike her ads, she does not use stage designs to send subliminal messages or advocate certain behaviors.

“It is a curiosity that so many of these directors see a dark side in my work,” she says. “But also my publisher, Nicholas Callaway, selected these nine projects for this book because they are the more glamorous and successful ones, but they also happen to be darker. I have a happier side.”

Ishioka’s future plans are, in fact, to show the world her happy side. The project she’s thinking of is a film for children of “Pinocchio,” which she would direct and fully design, frame by frame. Her goal is total independence so that her vision finally yields to no other person’s. “Whenever I create my planet,” she said, “always there are three words stuck in my head: originality, timeless and revolutionary. It’s very difficult to do. But it is my journey.”

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EIKO ISHIOKA, Art Center College of Design, Ahmanson Auditorium, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena. Date: Friday, 7 p.m. Admission: Free. Phone: (626) 396-2200.