The Extruded 3D Art of Yuki Matsueda

Japanese artist Yuki Matsueda brings art and signage to life by taking complimentary elements from the image, extruding them off the background and encompassing them in acrylic.




















The artist:

See more work by Yuki Matsuedahere

Modern Tech Meets Traditional Japanese Gold-Leafing in these USB Flash Drives.

With most new fangled technology gadgets being made of silicon, titanium or polypropylene, it's a refreshing change to come across something useful that harkens back to tradition.



Famous Japanese kinpaku manufacturer Hakuichi, who is known for their gold-leafing of several types of products and edibles, enters the computer peripheral world with these portable USB drives decorated with high-quality gold leaf designs, called hakue (or gold leaf pictures).





Chrysanthemums to birds to Mount Fuji adorn the front of these 4GB USB thumb drives or flash drives. While they are perfect for storing your data they bring an element of traditional Japanese hand-leafed gold design to the table.



The Hakue portable USB drives feature ten different distinctly Japanese designs:



Akafuji (Mt Fuji at dawn)
Fūjin Raijin (God of Wind and God of Thunder)
Houou (East Asian phoenix)
Kiku to Ryūsui (Chrysanthemums in water)
Kingyo (Goldfish)
Kouyo (Autumn leaves)
Nakiryu (Temple dragon)
Sakura Fubuki (Cherry blossoms)
Temari (Temari hand balls)
Tsuki to Usagi (Moon and rabbit)


Please note that this product is manufactured after receipt of order; as such, orders for this product cannot be cancelled. Additionally, the one-year hardware warranty only covers the USB solid state drive, not the design on the outside.

In Japan you can buy them directly from Hakuichi here.

In the US, you can buy them here for $198.28 USD

Artist Kimiko Yoshida And Her Stunning Self-Portraits

above: MINOTAUR BY PICASSO. SELF-PORTRAIT, 2007-2009
Archival Digital Print on canvas, anti-UV varnish, 142 x 142 cm or 59 x 59 inches


Above: Artist Kimiko Yoshida in her self-portrait titled Japonaise.

Artist Kimiko Yoshida was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1963 and left her home country, as a result of feeling the oppression against women. She now lives in Europe and has since 1995. The prolific artist has been transforming herself into various representations of herself and others in several series of self portraits (painting herself and then photographing it) since she began her career. She has turned herself into famous painters, Brides from all over the world, Blown glass letters and symbols and much much more. Over 330 different self-portraits in the last decade.

Delacroix:

Gaugin:

Matisse:

Navajo Warrior:

Pharaoh:

Picasso Torero

Quenton Metsys (moneylender):

Rembrandt:

Sheherezade:

Tiepolo:

Van Eyck:

Van Dyck:

Vermeer:

Watteau:


Her work has graced the covers of many art and photography magazines and she's received many awards including the recipient of 1st Place in the category of "self-Portraits" in the 2005 New York International Photography Awards.


above: artist Kimiko Yoshida, self-portrait

She has been so productive I can hardly show you all of her hundreds of self-portraits, but have chosen to share some of her more recent work with you here.

No one can explain these stunning and unusual self-portraits by artist Kimiko Yoshida better than the artist herself:

STATEMENT by Kimiko Yoshida, 2009

Since I fled my homeland to escape the mortifying servitude and humiliating fate of Japanese women, I amplified, through my art, a feminist stance of protest against contemporary cliches of seduction, against voluntary servitude of women, against “identity” defined by appurtenances and “communities”, against the stereotypes of “gender” and the determinism of heredity.

Art is above all the experience of transformation. Transformation is, it seems to me, the ultimate value of the work. Art for me has become a space of shifting metamorphosis. My Self-portraits, or what go by that name, are only the place and the formula of the mutation. The only raison d’être of art is to transform what art alone can transform. All that’s not me, that’s what interests me. To be there where I think I am not, to disappear where I think I am, that is what matters.

The representation of myself as a fiction mixing my Asian culture in references to Western art history is yearning for monochromy as a metaphor of effacement and disappearance, a mark of virtuality and intangibility, a symbol of infiniteness. The monochrome is a pure figure of duration wherein all imagery and all narrative are dissolved. Here, before the infinite colour, the gaze is exposed to the infiniteness of Time. This paradoxical representation is presented each time like an impossibility, a powerlessness, and a precariousness. It is this effect of incompleteness which gives the idea of a rigorous unrepresentable, unlocatable space, the idea of a space beyond the image where representation exceeds the space of representation.

My Self-portraits represent the attempt to render representation possible by seizing it at the point where what is present is the invisible absence at the heart of the image, that absence that the image makes a point of honour of making visible. The state of invisibility isn’t the point where I put myself on display, it is the point that I put on display. The state of invisibility I put on display is connected with the radical demand of art.

By giving the immaterial (the immaterial as the unnamed) an image in a series of portraits, the work of art represents what is invisible in a figure, its immateriality, before figuring itself as a figure of disappearance.

Kimiko Yoshida, a selection of some of her more recent self-portraits (2006-2009):












above: Project of a monumental wall (300 square meters/3230 square feet) gathering 154 photographs (C-prints mounted on aluminium & acrylic, 120 x 120 cm each, 48 x 48 inches each), installation 28 meters (92 feet) long by 9 meters (33 feet) high

There's a lot more amazing work to see at her website.
Kimiko Yoshida