Hosoya Gan was born on September 2, 1935, so his 87th birthday falls three days before this exhibition opens. In April 1953, eight years after the end of the war, Hosoya graduated from the Department of Technical Design at Kanagawa Technical Senior High School and joined the creative agency Light Publicity Co., Ltd. As of 2022, he is serving as chairman of the Board of Directors at Light Publicity. Looking back, Hosoya has been with the same company for as long as 69 years. During that time, he has also been a leading figure at the forefront of advertising design in Japan as art director and graphic designer, and as chairman of the Tokyo Art Directors Club.

Hosoya created stunning advertisements and editorial designs in rapid succession, demonstrating his complete mastery of stylish photography and materials. The designs include his striking debut, a poster for the Oscar Peterson Quartet shown at the Japan Advertising Artists Club exhibition in 1955, and a poster for a Yamaha 250 (1961) where he rotated the photograph by 90 degrees to express a sense of speed as if the motorcycle is falling through the air. Then there is his work on Bi: Nature and Thought in Japanese Design, the pamphlet for the World Design Conference in 1960 that astonished the leading Japanese and foreign architects and designers who attended the conference. The publication Forms in Japan (Bijutsu Shuppan-sha, 1963) is a collection of forms seen in Japanese traditional architecture and other things Japanese. His cover for the November 1962 issue of Asahi Camera magazine is a tension-filled close-up of the tip of a Japanese sword. Hosoya Gan’s style is stern and incisive, and his creative spirit is refined and single-minded. This is probably why he was the first Japanese designer to pioneer a new dimension in advertising, where the question is whether a work is truly creative and cultural.

This exhibition recalls masterpieces from more than half a century ago that constitute the design legacy of Hosoya Gan, which had fallen into oblivion. It is an opportunity to experience the concept behind the exhibition title: "a power that pierces the veil and flows into a glittering new world."*
 
* Power That Pierces the Veil and Shoots an Arrow through the Heart, from the foreword by Yahagi Kijuro.