newitalianblood

The NEW PEOPLE J-Pop Culture complex opened in the heart of Japantown, San Francisco; an area home to a five-storied pagoda that offers a curious and exotic sight even to the Japanese visitor. It is in this extravagant setting that we designed the interior of the new building, set to become a center showcasing modern Japanese popular culture, at the request of the owner, a manga (Japanese comics) publisher and president of the company managing the complex, VIZ Pictures, a distributor of Japanese cinema in the USA. The side panels of the mezzanine shop痴 displays feature faces of characters appearing in manga by artist Yuichi Yokoyama to bring out the flat 2D quality of the medium and represent the company colors, whose growth has paralleled that of Japanese comics. The "Face Furniture" characters seem to engage in a lively dialogue with each other as speech bubbles, like those found in comics, adorn the horizontal displays on the floor and the vertical displays on the walls.