DESIGNBOOM EXPLORES OSAKA ART & DESIGN 2025
Interactive sculptures, wearable statements, and color-shifting creatures take middle stage throughout Osaka‘s city panorama. As a part of Osaka Artwork & Design 2025, operating till June 24, artists and creatives from Japan and overseas current an thrilling number of exhibitions, installations, and site-specific works all through town. Throughout our go to, designboom explored numerous areas — from Takuya Kumagai’s playful capsule toy sculptures at W Osaka to Sayaka Miyata and Midori Hirota’s embroidered world of marvel within the Umeda Twin Towers concourse. Scroll down to find the initiatives that caught our consideration.
Osaka Artwork & Design highlights in 2025 | all photos courtesy of Osaka Art & Design
A SCULPTURE YOU CAN PLAY WITH LIKE A GACHA-GACHA TOY
For his set up on the W Osaka lodge, Takuya Kumagai reimagines Japan’s iconic capsule toy machines as 3D-printed sculptures within the type of ‘Play Sculpture (Gacha Gacha machine: Type-Atlas).’ Friends can work together with the work similar to they’d with an actual gacha machine — turning the dial, receiving a capsule, and discovering the miniature world inside. This sculptural playful expertise introduces a layer of shock to the design lodge foyer whereas referencing postwar artist Isamu Noguchi’s idea of varieties made for each play and contemplation.
Takuya Kumagai – Play Sculpture (Gacha Gacha Machine:Kind-Atlas)
AN EMBROIDERED MUSEUM OF BOTANICAL WONDER AND IMAGINATION
In a collaborative public set up throughout the home windows of the Hankyu Umeda Most important Retailer, Sayaka Miyata and Midori Hirota unveil ‘The New Museum of Wonder: The Gene of Curiosity.’ Influenced by the fantastical illustrations of Ernst Haeckel, the artists assemble imaginary organisms that evolve via the fusion of embroidery and AI. As if stepping right into a pure historical past museum of the longer term, viewers encounter textile specimens that radiate colour, texture, and tactile curiosity.
Sayaka Miyata / Midori Hirota – The New Museum Of Marvel: The Gene Of Curiosity
WEARABLE STORIES OF WOMANHOOD ROOTED IN TRADITION
Inside Daimaru Shinsaibashi, Polish artist and designer Joanna Hawrot presents her newest assortment ‘Unseen Threads,’ a cross-cultural collaboration merging Poland’s textile traditions with the shape and symbolism of the Japanese kimono. With designs developed in partnership with Polish artists and portrayed via intimate images by Zuza Krajewska, the clothes turn into visible poems, each exploring feminine identification via material, drape, and gesture. Within the Osaka context, these wearable artworks, exhibited at Daimaru Shinsaibashi, function quiet but highly effective cross-border dialogue.
Joanna Hawrot – Hawrot: Wearable Artwork – Unseen Threads
POPS OF YOKAI JOY HIDDEN ACROSS THE CITY
Humorous, otherworldly, and rooted in Japanese folklore, Maki Takato’s ‘YOKAI UNITY’ brings a forged of contemporary, 3d-scanned yokai creatures into the streets and shopfronts of Osaka. Usually seen within the corners of buildings or glowing from inside outdated homes, Takato’s yokai are up to date with up to date expressions and textures, changing into vibrant symbols of life and reminiscence. The installations recommend a brand new form of panorama, one the place the spirit world and every day routine coexist, reshaped by pleasure, absurdity, and the artist’s playful strategy to conventional mythology.
