art direction for Hand To Mouth
“Brick-and-Mortar Encyclopedia”
Art direction & photography for Hand To Mouth, a conceptual recycle shop in Tokyo
2024.02 - 2025.03
Project Overview:
A session project with a small recycle shop “Hand To Mouth” in Tokyo.
This store, whose concept is a “material room for creators”, sells intriguing objects that the owner collects from secondhand shops all over Japan, focusing on their pure properties such as form, texture, colour etc. The opportunity was to think of an innovative way of presenting products to differentiate from other “select secondhand shop” that is becoming increasingly popular in Japan.
The project series, entitled “Brick-and-mortar Encyclopedia”, attempt to propose a new way to look, interact and purchase an object.
That is to cut off all contexts that define a value of an object such as brand name, age and function, which are normally the benchmarks of secondhand products, and create an original classification of objects as Hand To Mouth. Mundane lifestyle products that have been collected from all of Japan purely for their intriguing features as an object, regardless of any preconceived value, are classified with a new theme of their common features and layed out in store like a page of a “3D encyclopedia”. This concept proposes a new shopping experience that encourages customers to observe, touch and feel the objects put under a new context, and find their own perspective of choice.
The event’s promotional assets, all photographed and designed by Eve, helps to further visualise the concept and demonstrates a new angle of perspective to the mundane objects that surrounds our life.
Eventually, after the 10th classification theme, the team aims at publishing an Encyclopedia of Objects, this time in a printed version. The purpose is to create actual research materials for creators, both in 2D and 3D form, for their source of inspirations. The event flyer of every theme is a page from this future Encyclopedia, which is distributed in store as collectibles.
Product still-life
