One of my favorite artist/designers — Kenzo Minami — has just completed a collection of prints and paintings called Remakes that you need to check out.

In his new solo show Remakes, Kenzo Minami addresses the phenomenon of remakes, both in art and in our culture at large, through repetition-based works that resist the conventional grammar of design.

Minami looks back on the past 10 years as a decade of remakes and repeats. As the beginning of a new century, the ’00s have been about wrapping up and reviewing the 20th Century so that we can finally prepare to begin a new phase in the 21st. Acknowledging the ubiquitous nature of archetypes that have been around since ancient times, Minami himself participates in reworking these same ideas in his paintings and prints, but with a consciousness that places the repetition at a remove.

Devoid of the visual punctuation of a clear focal point, Minami’s works take the act of repetition to a new level: they are anti-design, anti-characteristic, anti-motif, anti-concept. This is his vision of the way the 20th Century should have ended — with an acknowledgement of a culture of repetition, post-post-modernism, post-referencing, rebuilding, and loss of originality. In Minami’s “remake” of the end of the 20th Century, the slow death and the state of continuous ending that we have experienced in the first decade of the 21st Century- – without definition, ultimatum, or period at the end of the sentence – is no longer necessary.

The works will be on view in the gallery at the Soho Grand from 09.09.09 – 12.02.09.