This project is a spinoff project from the event called “The wonder 500”, organized by the Japanese ministry of Economy. The aim of this event is to discover delicate and wonderful 500 products made in Japan, and to promote them all over the world.
ARCHIEE designed this exhibition for Paris Design Week, which took place in Les Docks, a fashion and design place in Paris from 5th September to 12thSeptember. It was composed by two scales of stories.
The first scale is a small scale for the concept of a showcase. To create a showcase for Japanese products with the theme of “wonder”, we were interested in the spaces so-called “cabinets of wonders”. They are originated from European Renaissance, and they were literally showing a lot of curious objects within a space.
ARCHIEE wanted to create a space filled with objects so they designed a closed showcase in which objects are reflecting infinitely inside a limited space by using several sorts of mirrors: 100% reflecting mirrors, half mirrors, transparent glass, and strong lighting. These elements compose an effect that reflects the top and the bottom of objects by turns eternally fading to black.
The second scale is a meta-scale with the creation of a scenario to attract the Parisians, used to see Japanese products in Paris, to visit the exhibition. The idea was to show the difference of culture between France and Japan, thanks to the concept of the match, by showing wonderful Japanese products.
Influential French and Japanese professionals from same fields selected five items to exhibit. This way, the visitors could see not only Japanese objects, but also feel the difference of sensibilities between each professional. Finally 12 persons were grouped into 6 fields: chef, designer, writer, illustrator, artistic director and journalist. The concept of the match was expressed by homage to Ping Pong.
Based on these two scales, ARCHIEE designed the scenography of the exhibition by creating sets of bespoken showcases integrated in Ping-Pong tables. We intended to create the exhibition space as a wonderful space.
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