Kozyndan Exhibition at Paul Smith’s SPACE

18 Jul 2006 Category: Events & Exhibitions, Features, Illustration, Worldwide

Kozyndan Exhibition at Paul Smith’s SPACE

'War of The Monsters', Illustration for Official U.S. Playstation Magazine for an article about the Playstation 2 game War of the Monsters (illustration by Kozyndan)

Los Angeles based mad scientist and illustrator couple Kozyndan just opened their exhibition at Paul Smith SPACE in Shibuya, Tokyo last Friday. At their very first exhibition in Japan Kozyndan introduce their highly surrealistic yet comical and cute world.

Written by Chiemi

’FLIPS Shibuya’, Illustration for IDN’s ‘FLIPS 6 book’ (illustration by Kozyndan)

Kozue and Dan (Kozy-n-dan) who met each other at some college painting class in the late 90’s, started to collaborate officially in 2001. Since then, they have drawn illustrations for the record sleeves of Daedelus, Weezer, John Mayer, Our Lyrics and Lyrics Born, also for magazines such as Colors, Tokion, Relax, Giant Robot, XLR8R, and have joined projects for Resfest, Electronic Arts, Converse, Nike, Wieden＋Kennedy and IdN. Phew! That was a lot!

‘The Household’, llustration for their best friend Daedelus, for his EP on Eastern Developements entitled The Household. This image shows how his studio looks like…supposedly (illustration by Kozyndan)

Once you’ve seen one of their work, you are sure to remember it for their distinctive look, their own little world of illustration: surrealistic urban cities in the background acting as a base until you step closer and slowly lose yourself in strangeness…

A part of ‘Kin-san’s Business Trip’. Japanese salary men (business men) endure so many things at work and even at home, that Kozyndan just figured, that they must want to enjoy themselves in school girl uniforms every once in a while…… (illustration by Kozyndan) (editor’s note: even more surreal, when you ACTUALLY see that happening….)

This exhibition is the third one at the Paul Smith SPACE which only opened this March. How did they get selected? Kozyndan’s work was actually shown to Paul Smith himself through some of his friends and this is eventually how this exhibition came about. Congratulations!

Here are a few questions I managed to ask the artists:

Dan and Kozue - do you have any specific process as to how to create an illustration?

Kozue: It depends. Sometimes, it’s just one of us finishing off a piece and other times we would draw an illustration together. The usual process is that we draw rough sketches with a pencil on paper and scan it in. Then we start to color it in on Photoshop. If you take a closer look, you can see the lines drawn by a pencil on the background.

A part of ‘The Amorous Nudibranchs Paint the Town Red’. This actual illustration is much wider. You can see the real one at the exhibition! (illustration by Kozyndan)

How long do you usually take for a drawing?

Kozue: Well, it depends but for something like this (image above) we spent about 3 and an half weeks. In the third week, we kind of start to loose our minds and think ‘how can we ever finish this off in Photoshop…???’ (laugh).


「Catch of the Day」(illustration by Kozyndan)

「The Curious case of the Ice Cream Cannibals」(illustration by Kozyndan)

Illustration for Japanese porn magazine ‘Naked’. This image is a really long one. On the top, the title is ‘Horny…’ - looking down you read…

…Kozyndan’. I see… (illustration by Kozyndan)

Is there actually any particular theme for this exhibition?

Dan: Well, this is our first exhibition in Japan, so it’s more of a collection of our work we’ve done so far. There are various pieces: from record sleeves to illustrations for magazines…

I realized that - as opposed to your wild fantasy characters - you pick existing cities for your backgrounds pretty often!

Dan: Yes, so far we’ve done Shibuya, Okubo, LA, NY and some cities from Germany and Australia etc. In the end it is going to be a series of 25 cities. The theme? The theme is mmm….. social commentary, I guess.

‘Kozyndan Exhibition’ at Paul Smith SPACE in Shibuya. All the illustrations are for sale

‘Kozyndan Exhibition’ at Paul Smith SPACE in Shibuya

Finally - do you have a message for people out there in the real world?

Dan: Ok… mmm… how about this: ‘Fill your life with good things!’

Dan and Kozue A.K.A Kozyndan, who are a married couple. They enjoyed shopping at Tokyu hands just before this shot.

well, Dan and Kozue, thank you very much!

If you liked Kozydan’s world, I recommend you to visit the gallery of Paul Smith SPACE in Shibuya until the 20th of August. For more images and weirdness visit their website. Enjoy!

54 Comments

  1. Interesting :) i love the Salary Man wearing School Girl uniform, funny :)

    Posted by: kuswanto on July 18th, 2006 at 11:16 pm

  2. I was quite amazed when I first saw the originals of their art. Very intricate, detailed and tiny!

    Anyway, Kozyndan rules!! They are awesome!

    Posted by: G on July 18th, 2006 at 11:42 pm

  3. You guys have got awesome talent, and amazing surreal skills most of all it’s great to see a married couple collab and succeed! AWESOME Kozyndan!

    Posted by: zerogun on July 19th, 2006 at 12:00 am

  4. love the first pic. finally art that shows japan as it really is. ;)

    Posted by: scr on July 19th, 2006 at 2:37 am

  5. [...] Here’s a short interview at PingMag with L.A. cutie-pie (just scroll down the interview, you’ll see a photo) illustrator couple Kozyndan (that’s Kozue and Dan = Kozy-n-dan), who just opened their exhibition at Paul Smith SPACE in Shibuya, Tokyo. They have a blog too (but it has no RSS feed! How can I track their every post without a feed?!) [...]

    Posted by: Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog » Blog Archive » Kozyndan on July 20th, 2006 at 7:15 am

  6. [...] Pingmag is probably my favorite magazine now, with Giant Robot, I guess, you know. They are good so visually appealing, and you know, I like the way things look. Speaking of Giant Robot and Pingmag, theres a gallery exhibition at a Giant Robot owned gallery from Kozyndan, probably the cutest married couple illustrator team in the world. Seriously. Another illustrator you might want to see, if you want something good to see: Misprinted Type’s Eduardo Recife. If you want to see some moving at, you might want to check out Zumbakamera. I really like all of the films and art on that particular website. [...]

    Posted by: if thats the way it is (noway noway) at Definitive Reference on July 20th, 2006 at 10:23 am

  7. auuugggh

    so awesome

    Posted by: Fran on July 20th, 2006 at 2:49 pm

  8. Wow, very interesing, I wish we can enjoy it in China, I believed that our chinese talent will benefit form your works.

    Posted by: kipling on July 20th, 2006 at 6:32 pm

  9. Their work is so creative and beautiful. Thanks for this interview! I hope the exhibition will still be up when I visit in late August.

    Posted by: kareno on July 21st, 2006 at 1:18 pm

  10. I love them. I love fourth one, it has so realistic feel. The Household could be my place LOL

    Posted by: ヤーッコ on July 30th, 2006 at 3:18 am

  11. I got the war of the monsters, its so cool, but the prints are rare ( think so in london), I only know one place and cant find many on the internet to buy.

    Posted by: Badger on July 30th, 2006 at 7:58 am

  12. [...] Website [...]

    Posted by: Pingmag | Imagination Land on October 2nd, 2008 at 3:05 pm

  13. [...] Kozyndan bin ich vor einiger Zeit zufällig, über einen Artikel des japanischen Online-Magazins »Pingmag« aufmerksam geworden. Seitdem bin ich fasziniert und inspiriert von der fantasievollen Welt von [...]

    Posted by: Elma inspiriert: Kozyndan | Elmastudio on June 21st, 2010 at 10:21 pm

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