Nagi Noda
Nagi Noda is a artist/designer/director from Japan. Her world of creativity is both whimsical and strange. Her work "offers a twist" on the Japanese fascination with "kawaii," or cuteness. Nagi Noda says, "A lot of people call my work 'kowa kawaii.' It means cute, but a little bit weird. But I can make lots of styles: kowa kawaii, just kawaii, beautiful kawaii, fashion kawaii..." Among other things, Nagi Noda has designed stuffed animals, book jackets, and shopping bags. She is known for her line of half-panda creatures, called Hanpanda. 
Hanpanda is so cute!! but when several life-size Hanpandas are dancing around with eachother in a sake (japanese alcohol) commercial, these extremely cute Hanpandas create an unusual disturbing atmosphere. 
Through her own company, Uchu Country, she has directed short films and commercials for companies such as Nike and Laforet. the "fashion-forward" shopping mall in Japan's Harajuku district. I found her work for Laforet to be really interesting. In these sequence of posters, Noda gives the viewer a glimpse into bizarre and otherworldly scenarios. These posters immediately capture my attention, and their strange, open-ended scenes, draw the viewer in to get lost in both Nagi Noda's and your own imagination. 
I also found her exercise video piece to be interesting. It consists of poodles doing aerobics led by a poodle-like human instructor. At first glance, the video just seems to be a poor attempt to create a fun exercise video for children, but then you take a second look and you see that the lady instructor has bulges under her skin on her arms and legs which match the bulges of hair on the poodles. Im not sure if it holds any deep meaning, but it sure entertains my mind and its really funny in an unusual way.
The concepts and humor in Nagi Noda's works are a mixture of the simplicity and innocence that we had when we were kids, and the darkness and maturity of the adult world. Her work is described as "fresh and unexpected, and her execution is organic, which makes it more emotional. She doesn't rely on heavy post effects to get her point across."
posted by ashleep at 12:07 AM
1 Comments:
What I find interesting about Nagi Noda concept of latte is that she transfers the characteristics of a dog to it. But I have to ask why is he drinking the dog, I know he is a latte but still why? does it taste like a dog? I hope not. And another thing I think the life-size Hanpandas dancing in the sake commercial is sending a mixed message to a younger audience that it is okay and cute to drink alcohol and in real life it kills millions of people everyday. It seems to me that japan commercialism needs to look at what happened in the united states because of alcohol, and stop living in a made up fantasy and start realizing the harsh reality that addicting drugs like alcohol puts money in the pockets of the corporate interests groups that only care about money and nothing else.
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