Susumu Endo (1933–2024) was a Japanese graphic designer and printmaker who gained international recognition in both applied and artistic image-making. Although he was among the first designers to embrace Adobe Photoshop in the early nineties, his sensibility remained deeply analogue — merging his photography and drawings into evocative compositions.
I like to imagine how his works must have been perceived at the time as extremely sophisticated and downright sensationalist. When today, they almost seem naive on a technical level, beside the power of our current tools. Yet unlike much of the AI imagery flooding our present, Endo’s creations will not age as artefacts of excess, but as meditations on the space between the real and the imagined.
My basic concept of design is space and space. I feel there are different levels of consciousness that we can have of space, all coexisting at once. This is the concept that drives all the work I create. My main theme is the relationship of two different dimensions in space: the real and the imaginary.Endo Susumu
