FUTURE BEAUTY: 30 YEARS OF JAPANESE FASHION
Oct 15, 2010 - Feb 6, 2011 11:00am - 8:00pm talk/event
Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion is the first exhibition in Europe to comprehensively survey avant-garde Japanese fashion, from the early 1980s to the present. Curated by the eminent Japanese fashion historian Akiko Fukai, Director of the Kyoto Costume Institute, the exhibition explores the unique sensibility of Japanese design, and its sense of beauty embodied in clothing.
 
Japanese fashion made an enormous impact on the world fashion scene in the late 20th century and designers such as Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto redefined the very basis of fashion. Their works will be shown alongside Kawakubo’s protégé, the techno-couturier Junya Watanabe, together with the acclaimed Jun Takahashi, and the new generation of radical designers including Tao Kurihara, Fumito Ganryu, Matohu, Akira Naka and Mintdesigns.
£8 online/£10 on the door
 
For further booking details visit www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=10771

OMA/PROGRESS
Oct 6, 2011 - Feb 19, 2012
OMA/Progress profiles one of today's most influential architecture firms.
Opening up the west entrance to the Art Gallery for the first time, the show features an eloquent display of select materials from its offices worldwide and its archive in the Netherlands (dating from the 1970s) that reveals a complex attitude towards the notion of progress, within architecture and beyond.
The exhibition is guest curated by Rotor.

SONG DONG : WASTE NOT
Feb 15 - Jun 12, 2012
New commission for The Curve gallery. A meditation on family life and the artist’ own childhood during the Cultural Revolution, the installation comprises over 10,000 items collected by Song Dong’s mother over five decades - ranging from a section of the house to metal pots and plastic bowls to blankets, bottle caps, toothpaste tubes and toys. The activity of saving and reusing things is in keeping with the Communist adage wu jin qu yong – ‘waste not’ – a prerequisite for survival during periods of social and political turmoil.