Tokyo Art Beat T-Shirts Collection, Season 1
Season 1 collection's sale ended in August 2006. Please check out our newest collection.
The Artists
Jonathan Barnbrook
Barnbrook design is one of the most well known design studios working in London today. It has been producing innovative work since 1990. The studio works across a broad range of disciplines including print design, industrial design, typeface design and commercials for television. The studio's clients range from international museums to underground music magazines and self-initiated exhibitions. Barnbrook design also teach and lecture widely.
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About the Shirt
Its about the capacity of the city being the centre of many 'energies' where anything can happen, death, sex, communication, the clashing of completely disparate elements. The typography hints at the profusion of Neon in Tokyo plus the historical basis of all cities although they are the places of upmost modernity.
Paul Cox
Paul Cox was born in Paris in 1959. His real passion for graphic design emerges in the 90's when he gives up teaching to instead design children books, posters, press illustrations, logotypes etc... His work is both clever and playful, a real delight for kids and adults. He also designs theatre sets and costumes, games and experiments with his own printing techniques. His first book CoxCodex came out in 2004. He's spent the first half of 2005 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris organising a major toy installation using construction blocks. 
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Power Graphixx
Masahito Hanzawa was born in 1975, founded Power Graphixx in 1996. Since then, Power Graphixx has contributed many works to foreign as well as domestic media related to graphic designs. His works range broadly from logo marks, logotypes, book cover designs, posters to advertising, TV program titles and music videos. 
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About the Shirt
It's basically experimenting with typography (the 3 letters TYO for Tokyo), but it also represents how mixed Tokyo is. The city is like the eye of a storm.
Noboru Tsubaki
Born in Kyoto city in 1953. A professor in many institutions, Tsubaki cannot be described as someone who works in one medium: he has worked with large scale outdoor installation, interactive networked media, robotic sculpture and on community cultural projects. As a sculptor ,since the late 80s, he has been creating gigantic colorful sculptures using fiber reinforced plastic (FRP). They look as if some creatures or organisms have mutated and expanded. He has exhibited in numerous venues, such as the 45 th Vennice Biennal, San Francisco MOMA, and San Diego Museum of Modern Art.
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Buro Destruct
Buro Destruct was started in 1992 with the aim to encourage and promote young artists. The current crew counts 5 members. The design work of BD consists to a larger part of print matter (2D&3D) with a range from corporate identities, logotypes, ads, books, record-sleeves/cd-covers, posters to flyers... Even though the Buro Destruct often seems weird and precise enough to be Japanese, they're still located in Berne, the small and unsuspecting capital of Switzerland. 
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About the Shirt
The original idea was to reuse the sun from the Japanese flag to create a "smiley" face. Tokyo-san is the name of the girl smiling at you every day on the shirt. Handle with care.