Kenji Ekuan

Ekuan was born into a Buddhist temple family in Hiroshima and spent part of his childhood in Hawaii.² He studied at a naval academy, became a Buddhist monk, and later studied design at Tokyo Fine Arts University.²

Getty’s Union List of Artist Names lists Ekuan’s 1998 publication, The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox.¹ A study of Metabolist architecture describes Ekuan as the first Metabolist to build petite capsules, which it characterizes as combining aspects of housing, machinery, and furniture.³ The same study places Charlotte Perriand in a transnational design context linking France in the late 1930s and Japan in the late 1950s.³

Getty’s ULAN identifies Ekuan in person record 500128018 and lists his lifespan as 1929–2015.¹ The ULAN record cites MoMA artist and collection files, the Library of Congress authority number 81053919, and Avery Authority files; the listed coverage dates are source-file dates, not evidence of when a work entered a collection.¹ The same ULAN display includes a separate entry for a Japanese graphic designer who lived from 1929 to 2009, under ID 500125899, though sources dispute the conflation.¹