Colossal

5 stories

ColossalA Rare Disease and Analog Photography Merge in a Portrait of Self-Discovery “ Everything Twice ” is a quiet meditation on disability and the ways we orient ourselves in the world.

10.30

Colossal17th-Century Embroidery Meets Hand-Carved Wooden Vessels by Aspen Golann In the second half of the 17th century, when early American colonists were well into producing their own furniture , makers drew upon the motifs and techniques common in England.

10.30

ColossalNovember 2026 Opportunities: Open Calls, Residencies, and Grants for Artists Every month, we share opportunities for artists and designers, including open calls, grants, fellowships, and residencies.

10.29

ColossalFound Object Masks by Romuald Hazoumè Counter Sorrow with Sympathy Tethered to the spiritual realm, blue connotes a sense of serenity and healing in Yoruba culture. It’s also the color of peace, and for Romuald Hazoumè , it’s an apt metaphor for considering the…

10.28

ColossalA Macro Journey Underwater Reveals the Radiant Geometries of Coral Armed with high-magnification macro lenses, filmmaker Sandro Bocci journeyed through coral reefs to document a striking array of color, texture, and pattern.

10.28

発見, hakken: a finding. This is a record of what one designer notices in a week.

I grew up beside the Arakawa, in Adachi, and spent five years in a Ginza studio drawing identities for companies you have used without once thinking about them. That work teaches you to read a city as a page. A vending machine is set type. A rice bag is a packaging problem somebody solved in the eighties and nobody has improved on since. A good deal of the best design in Japan is like that: already in the street, unsigned, waiting to be looked at properly.

So this magazine watches the street as well as the feed. Around fifty sources come in through the day, ten of them Japanese, and what the world's studios are arguing about is counted and plotted so you can watch it move. Every third day I write about one thing I actually stood in front of.

What you get for a story is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the way out to the people who reported it. Never the article itself, and never the photograph as though it were ours. A story written in Japanese stays in Japanese here, headline and excerpt both, because that is how its author set it down.

Everything is also published in Japanese at hakkenmag.com/ja/.

— Ren Arakawa, Tokyo