Daydreaming with… The Hong Kong Edition

A few images from the Daydreaming with… show that opened last night in Hong Kong. Last image left to right shows our pieces: Wild Flower, Dandy and Sycamore Seed, Ian Monroe, 3D and Futura.

The show brings together over 30 local and international award-winning artists with Music by UNKLE including Nathan Coley, Polly Borland, Jamie Shovlin, Warren Du Preez & Nick Thorton-Jones, Futura, Simon Birch, 3D and Kai and Sunny.

More info on the show: http://daydreamingwith.com/index.php/the-hong-kong-edition/

Daydreaming with… The Hong Kong Edition

Sunny and I would like to invite you to Daydreaming with… The Hong Kong Edition. 

The show brings together over 30 local and international award-winning artists including Nathan Coley, Polly Borland, Jamie Shovlin, Warren Du Preez & Nick Thorton-Jones, Futura 2000, Simon Birch, 3D and Kai and Sunny.

If you happen to be in Hong Kong on Friday, 4May 6:30pm - 10.30pm we would be very happy if you could make it. rsvp@thefutureindustries.com

More info on the show: http://daydreamingwith.com/index.php/the-hong-kong-edition/

CREATIVE REVIEW - March 2012 Issue

Thanks to Creative Review for the article on our book covers in this months issue - page 48.

Thanks to David Mitchell for his contribution and his comments. Please see article below.

These days, the designer’s relationship with the author is usually more distanced; the work produced is often the result of an art director’s brief, or direct engagement with the text, rather than the writer. In 2004 designers Kai & Sunny were commissioned by Alasdair Oliver at Hodder to design and illustrate the cover of David Mitchell’s novel, Cloud Atlas. The idea, says Kai Clements, was to create a cover that “attempts to circle the globe and reaches from the 19th century to the future”. No mean feat. But Mitchell recalls “inwardly glowing with unearned gratification at how a single design could somehow evoke Victoriana, 70’s prog-rock and a post-apocalyptic future. That was the moment when I understood that brilliant designers don’t merely make artwork like the rest of us, only to a more-practised and higher level,” he says, ” rather, brilliant designers are brilliant because their brains are wired differently.”

According to Mitchell, Kai & Sunny’s approach (carried to a further three of his books) was to evoke the “structure of a text on which the content is hung”, rather than picking up on an element of the plot, or referencing a character or motif from the story. ” A competent but average designer might read a novel called Chekhov’s Cat, notice there’s a lot of cats in it, and knock up a decent cover with a cat looking inscrutable,” says Mitchell. But in reflecting the “symmetry” of Cloud Atlas; and the “interconnected narratives” within Ghostwritten in a single image, Kai & Sunny could then unite the books by employing a similar aesthetic and approach to decorative typography across all three. A more straight forward symbolic approach was used for Mitchell’s Black Swan Green - the heads of wheat echoing the cycle of life that animates the story.

(Source: kaiandsunny.com)