Kenya Hara

Born in 1958, Kenya Hara is a designer, the president and CEO of Nippon Design Center, and a professor at Musashino Art University. Hara has organized numerous exhibitions in Japan and elsewhere that have reexamined and reconstructed existing value systems. Among these are RE-DESIGN: Daily Products of the 21st Century, which went on tour; HAPTIC: Awakening the Senses; JAPAN CAR: Designs for the Crowded Globe; and HOUSE VISION 1-4.

Hara has implemented design that is deeply rooted in Japanese culture in a wide variety of projects such as the Nagano Olympics’ opening and closing ceremony programs and EXPO 2005. He has served as art director for MUJI since 2002, and has worked in a wide variety of fields. His projects include Matsuya Ginza, Mori Building, Tsutaya Books, Ginza Six, Mikimoto, Yamato Transport, and visual identity for the Chinese electronics company Xiaomi.

In 2008 and 2009, a large-scale solo exhibition of Kenya Hara’s work was held in Beijing and Shanghai. In 2016, at the Milano Triennale, an exhibition titled NEO-PREHISTORY: 100 Verbs, on which Hara and Andrea Branzi collaborated, represented human history in terms of the coevolution of tools and desires. For the project of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs known as JAPAN HOUSE, a cultural institution with locations in Sao Paulo, London, and Los Angeles, Hara served as a comprehensive producer, pouring his energy into the task of representing Japanese culture as a resource for the future. In 2019, Hara launched a website for the High Resolution Tour project, introducing various locations in Japan from a unique perspective, and pioneering a new approach to the tourism industry.

Kenya Hara has written many books, including Design of Design (Iwanami Shoten, 2003), DESIGNING DESIGN (Lars Müller Publishers, 2007 / Iwanami Shoten, 2007), White (Chuokoron-Shinsha, 2008 / Lars Müller Publishers, 2012), Designing Japan (Iwanami Shoten, 2011 / Lars Müller Publishers, 2019), 100 Whites (Chuokoron-Shinsha, 2018 / Lars Müller Publishers, 2019), and High Resolution Tour (Iwanami Shoten, 2022).