TALK IN THE WILD SIDE is a collaborative serialized feature between Hypebeast and UT magazine, the online/print media platform of UNIQLO UT, the T-shirt brand of UNIQLO. In this series, UT creative director Kosuke Kawamura invites a different guest each time for a creative conversation. In this second installment welcomes Katsuhiro Otomo, whose influence on creators both in Japan and abroad spans generations.
Since creating the key visual for the 2012 Katsuhiro Otomo
GENGA Exhibition, Kawamura and Otomo have developed both a professional and personal friendship. At the time they met, Kawamura was still an unknown young artist, but he has since grown into a globally active creator. Together, Otomo—whom Kawamura considers a “spiritual mentor”—and Kawamura look back on the many works they have created together.
TALK ON THE WILD SIDE: KATSUHIRO OTOMO
Kawamura: Today I’d like to revisit how Otomo and I first met, and the work we’ve done together since then.
Otomo: At first, I think we happened to meet at Uesugi’s office while preparations for the GENGA Exhibition were underway.
Kawamura: That’s right (laughs). That day, after going to an izakaya with Uesugi-san, he said he still wanted to drink more and invited me back to the office. It must’ve been around 1 or 2 in the morning when a completely drunk Otomo suddenly came in to use the bathroom (laughs). I was shocked—“Whoa, that’s the real Katsuhiro Otomo!”
Otomo: I saw some guy I didn’t know there, so I asked, “What do you usually do?” and he said, “I make collages.”
Kawamura: I showed him photos of my work on my phone, and he said, “These are good,” then suddenly asked me to do the main visual for the original art exhibition (laughs).
Otomo: At the time, I was struggling with what to do for the GENGA Exhibition key visual. The exhibition was going to display all my original drawings from my debut onward, but expressing the entirety of my work in a single image was difficult. If I wanted to draw something completely new, that would’ve been easy. But when I heard “collage,” I thought, that’s interesting. Collaging together various works from the past matched the exhibition’s concept perfectly and might make for a strong visual.
Kawamura: He asked so casually, like “Why don’t you try it?”, and that actually made it terrifying (laughs).
Otomo: I didn’t know any collage artists, so I figured you were just right for it. Plus it meant I didn’t have to draw it myself (laughs).
Kawamura: (laughs) When I asked him for image data to use as collage material, he said there was no such thing and told me to come look at the original artwork at his house. About three days after first meeting him, I came to this studio and there were piles of original pages from AKIRA and Domu. He told me I could photocopy as much as I wanted. At first I carefully copied one page at a time, but eventually my senses went numb and I started copying everything in sight (laughs). In the end, I made around 500 or 600 copies.
Otomo: Using our copier, too. I’m amazed we even had that much paper (laughs).
Kawamura: Later, one of the designers on the exhibition committee asked me to make a collage using manga characters, so I initially made exactly what they requested. But then Otomo said, “Forget the characters—just do whatever you want in your own style.” So I made three completely different versions and showed them to him in rough form, and he said, “These are awesome.”
Otomo: I understood the committee’s intention—they wanted broad appeal and recognizable manga characters—but that would’ve been boring. Kawamura’s version, on the other hand, was filled with mechanical imagery, and I found it really interesting. It was incredibly detailed too. It felt new.
Kawamura: I was really happy to hear that. But Otomo did point out one layout change, remember? Originally I had placed the ruined AKIRA building at the bottom of the background, but when I showed it to him he said, “Let’s flip the background upside down.” When I did, I thought, Whoa, this is it. That’s when the key visual truly clicked into place. It showed me how terrifyingly important layout design is. Otomo’s sense of layout and balance is honestly broken.
Otomo: Well, it was your first major job.
Kawamura: I learned so much. But when we submitted the finished visual to the committee, the designer complained that there weren’t any characters in it, so none of it could be used. I was really depressed, but then Otomo showed up and simply said, “We’re going with all of these exactly as they are.” After that nobody could really object. In the end they used them unchanged, but I still wasn’t sure if it was really okay. Then Otomo told me: “It’s fine. You made something new, so ordinary people won’t understand it immediately. Wait about six months—it’ll spread everywhere around the world. So don’t get too discouraged.” Those words still stay with me.
Otomo: In the end everyone agreed it was the right choice. And the visual really did spread around the world.
Kawamura: Years later I asked him why he entrusted such a huge job to me out of nowhere, and he said, “If the finished work was bad, we just wouldn’t use it” (laughs). Honestly terrifying…
Otomo: Well, it worked out, didn’t it? (laughs)
Kawamura: After that we worked together many times, and every time he’d say something surprising. For example, when I did the cover for
Oyaji-shu (Shueisha, 2015), I showed him the piece still held together with masking tape, just like during the GENGA Exhibition. Then he said: “Wouldn’t it be better with the masking tape still on it? Let’s just scan it like this.” I was like, “Seriously?” So I nervously scanned it as-is.
Otomo: The color of the masking tape was good. That blue against the monochrome image looked beautiful.
Kawamura: Also, the reason I started making shredder artworks—and kept doing them—is thanks to Otomo.
Otomo: Was it?
Kawamura: Absolutely. Do you remember when I asked you to write the obi comment for my first art book 2ND (ERECT Lab., 2012)? We were short on time before submitting it, so I shredded original artworks I had been planning to throw away and used them to fill the pages. When I showed it to Otomo, he said: “Wouldn’t it be interesting if you kept doing this shredder thing? You should continue it.” Since Otomo said that, I thought maybe I should keep going—and continuing eventually led to the style I have now.
Otomo: Well, collage alone can only take you so far. Even if one technique makes your name known, the real issue is what comes next. If you don’t find a new style, you can’t evolve as an artist. And finding that is difficult.
Kawamura: The
INSIDE BABEL project in 2017 was incredibly difficult, but so much fun. I still remember that the day you called me about it happened to be my birthday. I was in my office and got a phone call from Otomo, and I thought, “Wait… does he actually remember my birthday?”
Otomo: Of course not (laughs).
Kawamura: (laughs) I answered nervously and he said, “What are you doing right now? Can you come to my office?” When I got there, someone from the Asahi Shimbun had just finished discussing the project with him, and all the materials were spread across the table. He asked: “Do you know the Tower of Babel? Want to do this together?” The offer was for Otomo to reconstruct Bruegel’s Tower of Babel.
Otomo: Before starting, we toured several museums in Europe to see Bruegel’s original paintings. The food was great too—it was a nice trip.
Kawamura: Yeah, traveling to all those countries was amazing. But when we came back, hellish work awaited us (laughs). Otomo started analyzing the painting’s structure mathematically while observing the image.
Otomo: I began sketching based on the original painting, but after calculating things I realized the tower wasn’t actually a perfect circle. There are two versions of Bruegel’s Tower of Babel: one in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum (1563) and another in Rotterdam’s Boijmans Museum (1565). The latter—the one exhibited in Japan—is smaller but more meticulously painted. What fascinated me was its spiral structure. It twists upward toward heaven. I wondered how Bruegel drew it. There’s a technique called the camera obscura that old painters like Vermeer used. David Hockney discusses it in his book Secret Knowledge. In that book he writes that Bruegel was probably one of the few painters of that era who didn’tuse a camera obscura. But according to my own theory, Bruegel actually did use one when painting The Tower of Babel. I even shared this hypothesis with the curator at the Boijmans Museum, but they replied, “Interesting, but we don’t know.” That’s why I never mentioned it in the NHK program either.
Kawamura: When Otomo explained all the perspective inconsistencies he found, none of them had ever been researched before—even by scholars who had studied Bruegel for decades.
Otomo: I’d ask things like, “Where is the entrance to the tower?” and they’d answer, “That hasn’t been determined.” But after carefully examining the materials, I found what I believed was the entrance gate.
Kawamura: I still remember him suddenly contacting me saying, “I found the entrance!” (laughs)
Otomo: Then I noticed a river flowing along the left side of the tower with a clear exit in the foreground. That made me think there must also be a river running through the center of the tower.
Kawamura: And the donut-shaped hollow interior of the tower—that also came from Otomo’s structural calculations.
Otomo: If the center weren’t hollow, the tower would collapse under its own weight.
Kawamura: You kept getting curious about every detail, so the work never progressed (laughs).
Otomo: But researching it was fascinating. Eventually I decided to cut open the center of the tower to reveal the internal structure. But there was no point in drawing all the interior details myself. So I had Kawamura cut up my sketches and the photos we’d taken of Bruegel’s paintings in Europe into tiny pieces and paste them all together. So technically, that work was also a collage.
Kawamura: Everything was cut into 1–2 pixel fragments and assembled like pixel art to digitally recreate Bruegel’s brushwork. In the end, the editing software contained over 25,000 layers (laughs). I’d never worked with that many layers before. Rather than collage, it felt like I was drawing for the first time. What amazed me was that when I added shadows digitally, Otomo specified even the exact gradient percentages. He doesn’t normally draw digitally, but when I followed his instructions it became absolutely perfect. I honestly wondered what was going on inside his head (laughs). And in the end, none of Otomo’s original lines remained—we erased all of them. That decisiveness was incredible too.
Otomo: It worked, didn’t it? The exhibition was a huge success.
Kawamura: The final result was insane. Our work was displayed right at the exhibition’s main entrance, and huge lines formed every day because people couldn’t even get inside. Honestly it was the hardest job I’ve ever done, but it was unbelievably fun.
Otomo: There aren’t many jobs that interesting. But talking only about the past gets boring. What have you been working on lately?
Kawamura: My main work this year (2025) has been the key visual for the Eiichi Ohtaki exhibition “Eiichi Ohtaki’s NIAGARA 50th Odyssey”, the jacket design for the 50th anniversary remix EP, and also the official logo and tour poster for the reunited Oasis. Right now I’m also working on the key visual for Kyoko Koizumi’s 60th anniversary concert tour.
Otomo: That’s impressive. Me? I only get boring jobs.
Kawamura: Come on (laughs), don’t you mostly just turn down the huge offers you receive?
Otomo: Actually, the other day I got another request from an overseas musician.
Kawamura: Wait, who? …Could it be ××××?
Otomo: Yeah, that’s right. He wanted to collaborate on AKIRA, but I told him I’m not doing AKIRA anymore, so I turned it down.
Kawamura: Wha—seriously!? Why would you refuse?! I love him!
Otomo: Well, I haven’t really listened to much of his music. It’s fine. I’m just someone who quietly does steady work.
Kawamura: Otomo is really is terrifying…
Otomo: Still, it’s good that you’re getting plenty of work now.
Kawamura: Yeah. When we first met I had absolutely no work at all. I was around thirty and genuinely had nothing to do every day. You used to take me out to eat all the time. Now, thankfully, I get lots of jobs. I’ve even become able to buy you dinner. I never imagined a day like that would come.
Otomo: Glad to see you succeeding. …Isn’t this interview long enough already?
Kawamura: No, no, don’t stop now (laughs). By the way, the last project we worked on together was the AKIRA ART OF WALL Katsuhiro Otomo × Kosuke Kawamura AKIRA ART EXHIBITION for the reopening of Shibuya PARCO in 2019, right? Since that exhibition we haven’t really collaborated again, so I’d love to work together on something new.
Otomo: True, we haven’t done anything lately.
Kawamura: Right now I’m serving as the creative director for UT, and I’d love to make T-shirts together. We already collaborated on the Supreme project back in 2017.
Otomo: That was a job you brought me.
Kawamura: Exactly. It really reminds me that Otomo is in a completely different league as a designer too. Especially his sense of layout—it’s extraordinary. Recently I was blown away by the T-shirts that came as purchase bonuses for The Complete Otomo Works, and also the MEMORIES T-shirt released by GEEKS RULE in 2024. On the front, the artwork uses only the center crop of an already amazing poster image. Then on the back, each letter in “MEMORIES” is made from photographed objects found around the city that resemble those letters. We used the same technique for the posters and T-shirts of the Kichijoji Music Festival back in 2018. It’s probably work most people don’t even know about (laughs).
Otomo: Yeah, that happened too (laughs). We had people photograph shop signs and things around Kichijoji.
Kawamura: Not only are those ideas amazing, the designs themselves are cool. When we made the INSIDE BABEL T-shirts together, I also noticed how much attention you pay to the body selection and sizing every single time. You seem to calculate the balance of the object itself very carefully. You’ve designed book covers too—you’re honestly beyond the level of ordinary designers. I’ve always wanted to ask: when you’re drawing and when you’re designing T-shirts, does it feel like you’re using different parts of your brain?
Otomo: Yeah, I think so. When it comes to design, I’ve definitely been influenced by old rock albums.
Kawamura: Ahh, that makes total sense.
Otomo: First of all, record jackets were cool. Ever since I was young I’ve looked at rock records constantly and bought tons of them.
Kawamura: So in a way, T-shirts also come from the atmosphere and design language of rock tees.
Otomo: Something like that. Which is why it’s a little sad that music today is mostly distributed digitally. People can’t physically hold album covers in their hands anymore. There are fewer opportunities now for people to discover music through something like “jacket buying”—seeing an album cover, buying it based only on the artwork, and then falling deeply into the music itself. Young people have fewer chances to engage proactively with design. Everyone walks through the city and sees things other people made, but they just glance at them and move on. I think design can’t truly evolve unless people actively choose things themselves—buying them, touching the real objects with their hands, spending time looking at them.
