Concerned residents—and who knows, terrified tourists, too? The public art exhibit—timed to coincide with the International Contemporary Furniture Fair —landed Miyakawa in Rikers with a day sentence and a prescribed mental evaluation.
The charges: reckless endangerment, criminal nuisance, and planting a false bomb. He was released after a days-long stint and was just recently pronounced sane enough to stand trial. Update : Charges were dropped. However, in general, other inmates were quite sympathetic about my situation once I told them my story. There was a TV so many of them saw me on the news, so they treated me with respect. Two of them asked for my autograph. Signs of the alleged bomb-planting fiasco still sway throughout Brooklyn.
During a recent stroll around Williamsburg, we pass a tree on Bedford Avenue where a ragged plastic bag—one of his—still hangs, now emptied of its contents, flapping in the wind. Miyakawa, suddenly skittish, scurries away from his creation.
The nervousness seems uncharacteristic of the artist. Perhaps he recalls being carried away in handcuffs, the cold stubbornness of his judge. The Japan-born Miyakawa, 50, moved to New York in The city, he says, is an ever-reliable boon to his creativity.
One of his most poignant homages to the city is also one of his simplest. Miyakawa knows that beauty can grow out of efficiency and necessity, an ethos he captures in his geometric tables, whimsical chairs, and innovative light fixtures. His pieces can verge into the philosophical, too.
His legal troubles, however, may complicate that process. It speaks more to an existential crisis than a Zen state of mind. What inspires Miyakawa? You have to listen to what the people are saying. He shows us a piece of wire bent into an angular form, originally used to restrain a champagne cork.
He empties his deep-pocketed cargo pants—snagged from an army store in Jersey on the cheap. Frugality is more than habit for Miyakawa; it is a philosophy. His preferred environment is a spare one; Miyakawa works mostly alone. Miyakawa graduated from Tokyo Science University in architecture, but his education started much earlier. As a boy, he used to watch his father make wooden airplanes.
He recalled that the trick to curving a thin strip of bamboo was to gently heat it over an open flame. He specializes in well-crafted high-concept but functional furniture, like this oval table. He is a minimalist, valuing quality, integrity, and simplicity over quantity, speed, and expediency. The cube, which accomplished the mathematical feat of using virtually all its volume, made a splash in design blogs like Designboom.
Miyakawa has resisted the digitization of design and produces all his models by hand. Miniature studies for tables, chairs, and storage units—as well as a couple of knickknacks picked up from the streets. The last job he still holds. He is currently designing a table that uses all the leftover scraps of wood—planks of different lengths and tree types—from previous projects. Here, one of the models for the table. Miyakawa eschews trends, such as eco-design, but maintains firm commitment to his own brand of honest craftsmanship.
That includes repurposing leftover wood from his projects and always connecting crucial furniture joints himself versus delegating such tasks to a second fiddle. No matter how much his stature grows—and it is growing, as evidenced by this recent profile —he will likely maintain the spare, quiet lifestyle he has enjoyed for the past decade. His large social circle has played a significant role in fighting his incarceration, by launching this petition and Facebook group on his behalf.
Lately, Miyakawa is spending more time on photography. These negatives are from a shoot on the Williamsburg waterfront. Years ago at dusk, Miyakawa trespassed onto a construction site, likely some shiny upscale condominium now, and started taking pictures in the encroaching night.
The photos are dark and somber: black steel beams jutting into the sky and the shadowy undergirth of the Williamsburg Bridge. They are beautiful but desolate images, a raw version of New York seen through the eyes of a solitary individual. Quiet, rugged individualism has gotten Miyakawa and his designs this far—and into this hole of a legal case.
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