/ Jiro Kamata：VOICES

Look at where we are today: in every aspect of design, high fashion, contemporary aesthetics and the digital frontier, the elements that so uniquely characterized the look and feel of the Y2K era have been freshly rematerialized. Vivid hues, metallic sheens, imagined functionality, amorphous shapes, and streamlined space-age optical fantasies are ever present once again. Jiro was there.
They evoke yesterday’s still not fully realized vision of tomorrow.

And like all the aforementioned pieces, they are also timelessly stylish: any of these bodies of work could have been a perfect fit for the spectacularly futuristic collections of Walter Van Beirendonck in the late 1990s (the most eccentric of the Antwerp Six) - but are also an effortless match for your pick of Maison Margiela’s Artisanal Haute Couture collections from 2017 to right now.

And for that, they are instant contemporary classics, dependent on no one period in time. I choose to compare Jiro’s opus of jewelry wonders to the most adventurous and stunning of high fashion, rather than to high art or academia, because frankly, it’s more fun. That is not to say of course that his work is not art (I will leave that to others to say anyhow, for they will). I just feel such distinctions are non-serving, often building walls around things that only exclude the gaze of newcomers to the field of Contemporary Jewelry. Jiro’s pieces are deserving and capable of hypotheticals far beyond the confines we are used to: a techno utopia, the creation of your digital avatar, as agents of self-actualization, in cyberspace or otherwise.

Jiro Kamata is both a minimalist and a maximalist. It is not a hard conclusion to draw that his work will define how the early 21st century will be remembered within the cult of Contemporary Jewelry - of which he is an elite.

- Kellie Riggs

Is it not the ultimate goal of fashion to become invisible? Indeed, a unique burden of our time is the constant exposure as a fashion object to scrutinizing eyes everywhere, often driving one to the paradoxical desire to disappear from any gaze altogether.

- Sool Park