Tomoko Miho (September 2, 1931-February 10, 2012) was a greatly influential graphic designer, who like many Japanese-Americans of her time, spent her formative years in an internment camp during World War II. Despite the constraints within her life, she is an example of greatness that emerges in spite of difficult, external factors. In her school years, Miho was inspired to pursue the arts by trips to the Museum of Modern Art, and later graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and Art Center College of Design (Yoo). Her employment began in the field of packaging design, but was later named Art Director for George Nelson, an American industrial designer known as a founder of Modernism.
Her work is inspired by the Swiss international style, but also attributes her design style to an Asian garden philosophy known as shakkei (借景), or ‘borrowed scenery’. This philosophy emphasizes “the way that the background is integrated into the foreground, transforming the experience of a space and also [allows] for a sense of completeness within a small environment” (Hewitt). The forms that occupy her compositions utilize space in both the foreground and background, creating works that are clean, crisp, and with high-readibility and yet, incredibly complex. (Kasay) Shakkei is a philosophy she weaves into all facets of her practice, as she writes that her mandate is to “join space and substance” (Vienne).
By referencing her understanding of three-dimmensional space, Miho meticulously gardens every section of graphic space within her work. In doing so, she not only creates visually beautiful work, but pieces that are balanced, deep, and feel larger than they appear on a mere two-dimensional plane. Her work and life emphasizes the greater importance of a whole than its parts, and yet her practice teaches us that tending to details feeds the whole, just as multi-layered foliage ultimately begins with single branches of trees.
Cooper, Hewitt. “Tomoko Miho.” Tomoko Miho | Biography | People | Collection of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, collection.cooperhewitt.org/people/18062847/bio.
Diana, Kasay. “Designing Women: Tomoko Miho.” Designing Women: Profiles, designingwomen.readymag.com/profiles/tomoko-miho/.
Vienne, Veronique. “1993 AIGA Medalist: Tomoko Miho.” AIGA, 9 Sept. 1994, www.aiga.org/medalist-tomokomiho.
Yoo, Kevin. “Remembering Tomoko Miho.” Ginkgo Journal, Ginkgo Journal, 2 Sept. 2017, ginkgojournal.com/home/remembering-tomoko-miho/2017.
Thank you for letting me know more about the philosophy of Shakkei.
I like the Shakkei skills, I can tell that many animation artists use the Shakkei skills in their works, especially Makoto Shinkai.