Our Thursday series features must-read books from each branch of the art bookshop NADiff. This week's book is "SOUND AND VISION" by painter Jun Tsunoda. It's introduced by Gallery 5, a branch in Shinjuku, Tokyo (3-20-2 Nishi-Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo Opera City Tower, 3rd floor).

■ "SOUND AND VISION" by Jun Tsunoda

Jun Tsunoda (who used the name Junichi Tsunoda while working as an art director) has been active in the fields of advertising and publishing since the 1980s.

This book is a collection of drawings by Tsunoda, who began his career as a painter in the mid-2000s and arrived at a new form of expression through abstract painting: "letters."

The drawings are "words," an accumulation of letters. While some of the drawings are so exquisitely written that they lose all trace of their original form, the words of famous writers and artists such as Matsuo Basho, Taneda Santoka, and Emily Dickinson are freely expressed in a variety of styles of writing that you may have seen in town or in books, including calligraphy, calligraphy, Arabic script, and graffiti tagging.

The power of words and the primitive beauty of letters, combined with Tsunoda's paintings, create a book that displays a unique worldview in which "sounds" and "images," as the title suggests.

[Book Information]
"SOUND AND VISION"
Artist: Jun Tsunoda
Publisher: Torch Press
Language: Japanese, English
Cover / 136 pages / 297 x 210 mm
Publication: April 2017
Price: 2,800 yen