Mori Gallery
- —Art Direction
- —Campaign Design
- —Exhibition Identity
- —Editorial Photography Brief
- —Collateral Design
Mori Gallery's autumn exhibition needed a campaign identity in four weeks. The artist's work dealt in tension, fragmentation, and the space between — so did ours.
Gallery campaigns fail when they illustrate the work rather than continuing it. Mori's artist — Yuki Tanaka — works with physical fragmentation: torn paper, cut surfaces, interrupted lines. Our campaign had to do the same thing with type and image, not just reference it.
INTERRUPTION AS LANGUAGE
The campaign headline is typeset and then cut. Physically cut, scanned, and reassembled digitally with visible tape marks. The fragmentation is real. The repair is real. The tension between them is the point.
RESTRAINT THEN RUPTURE
The base palette is near-monochrome — graphite and off-white, consistent with the gallery's existing identity. Into this, we introduced a single disruptive accent: a saturated coral that only appears in moments of maximum tension in the composition.
— Nadia Volkov, Brand StrategistThe best colour in a campaign is the colour that shouldn't be there. The one that makes you ask why. If you have to ask, it's working.
FROM WALL TO POCKET
The campaign ran across: three-sheet posters in Shinjuku, Ginza, and Shibuya; a 16-page preview booklet; invitation cards; exhibition text panels; and an Instagram series that ran for eight weeks before the opening.
The exhibition opened to a record attendance for the gallery. The campaign posters sold as prints at the exhibition. We consider that the highest possible outcome for this kind of work.
IMMERSION
One week with the artist's work — physically, not from a screen. We visited the studio in Tokyo and handled the actual pieces. That changed the direction entirely.
CONCEPT
Seven concepts developed in parallel, each continuing the work in a different way. Client review narrowed to two. We argued for the cut type. They agreed.
PRODUCTION
Four-week sprint across poster, booklet, invitation, and digital. Physical print production managed with the printer in Tokyo. Everything finished three days before opening.