SHOHEI TAKASAKI is a Tokyo based Fine Arts artist and art director who along with an impressive collection of expressive and uniquely intense artwork, has produced a number of album covers for underground Japanese bands and producers, including the incredible Jungle/Dubstep outfit Rebel Familia.
Shohei joins LTRHDS with his re-interpretation of the letter V, after his recent solo show at PLSMIS gallery, Aoyama Tokyo titled Splithead.
Tell us about your career as an art director working in the music scene. How did you fall into that world?
I started off as a painter. The first time that I provided a work for a CD cover, I was unsatisfied with the outcome. From then on, I wanted to be in charge or in control of the text layout, to be able to provide the design work… so that’s how I came to work as an art director/designer.
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Do you create music yourself? How would you compare your visual art to a musical composition
No, I don’t create music. But I do love music.
It’s the same excitement you get when you take a look at paintings. It seems like a similar yet very different composition process.
When making music you can pick and choose… you can go back to the past to edit and create a better work (of course not the live performances). But for the art work, once you have touched the work you can’t go back to the past. You can only go over them. The experience of the dynamism is quite exciting.
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It must be liberating to be working on full sized canvases rather than small record sleeves? Do you feel that the spatial constraints of cd packaging has perhaps helped make your style more intense?
When i do an art direction and design, i use the other half of my head, but i believe there are some effect and cross over.
Creating some thing is always exciting both design and painting.
At the same time, even when i paint i have a angle of an art director.
Art work should be free and fun.
I noticed that your recent Splithead exhibition featured several tall coffin-shaped works. Do you think much about the temporary nature of existence?… your works have a certain impulsive spontaneity that seems to reflect this.
I think about ‘death’. Thinking about ‘death’ is not negative at all. By doing so, I think it makes us live positively towards life itself..
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Shohie Takasaki is part of 26 artists in the LTRHDS exhibition, on display in Melbourne during February / March
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“show me your heart_1″ 61 x 46 cm silk screen print on paper (oil ink) 2009
“golden lady_yellow” 91 x 72.5 cm Acrylic and silk screen. ink on canvas 2009
