Contemporary artist Tomokazu Matsuyama, based in New York, and A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE (hereafter A-POC ABLE) have unveiled a new coat as part of their co-creation project, TYPE-XII Tomokazu Matsuyama project.

The project originated from FIRST LAST, Matsuyama's first major solo exhibition in Tokyo, held at Azabudai Hills Gallery in the spring of 2025. A limited-edition item created for the exhibition received an enthusiastic response, leading to the development of a newly introduced coat that reconstructs Matsuyama's artwork into "A Piece of Cloth." The coat will now be released both in Japan and internationally.

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In addition, a special exhibition dedicated to the project is on view at MADO, the gallery space adjoining ISSEY MIYAKE / NEW YORK, from July 9 through August 31, 2026 (JST).

Alongside paintings related to the project, the exhibition features an installation in which textiles reconstructed from Matsuyama's visual world are suspended from the ceiling. Paintings, a single piece of cloth, garments that envelop the body, and the exhibition space itself are brought together to create a dialogue in which each medium reshapes its relationship with the others.

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Yet to describe this project simply as a collaboration in which a contemporary artist’s work has been printed onto clothing would be to miss its essence. What Matsuyama and A-POC ABLE have pursued is not the straightforward transfer of one form of expression into another. Painting and clothing meet while retaining their respective characteristics, and the relationship between them is itself reconstructed.

Not a Conventional “Collaboration,” but a Shared Process of Creation

Central to understanding the project is the distance that both Tomokazu Matsuyama and A-POC ABLE designer Yoshiyuki Miyamae maintain from the conventional idea of a “collaboration.”

In a dialogue included in the exhibition catalogue, Matsuyama uses the phrase “a crossover of creative DNA” to describe what can emerge when creators from different fields—including art, architecture, and fashion—come into contact.

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The aim is to move across established disciplines and influence one another without allowing either practice to be absorbed into the language of the other. For something previously nonexistent to emerge, it is not enough simply to place recognizable works or brand names side by side. Both parties must enter more deeply into each other’s thinking and creative processes.

Miyamae, meanwhile, explains that because he has felt a certain discomfort with the conventional use of the word “collaboration,” A-POC ABLE sometimes deliberately chooses the Japanese term kyōgyō, which suggests working jointly through a shared process. Rather than receiving a finished motif and placing it on the surface of a garment, the value lies in sharing the process through which a new work is conceived and made.

That position underpins TYPE-XII. It is also reflected in the project’s official description, which states that A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE’s innovative design process and Matsuyama’s multifaceted visual expressions are integrated into a single piece of cloth, revealing new possibilities at the intersection of art and design.

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The central achievement, then, is not the successful transplantation of one practice into another. The essence of this co-creation lies in what happens when different ways of thinking react within a shared process and gradually develop into a new structure.

Diverse Contexts Form a New Landscape

When asked where he perceived a connection between Matsuyama’s work and A-POC ABLE, Miyamae responded:

Matsuyama’s work has the power to bring diverse cultures, eras, and values into contact, allowing them to generate a new landscape. Rather than simply arranging different elements side by side, each acquires a new perspective through its relationship with the others. I felt a strong affinity with that approach.

Matsuyama’s paintings bring together imagery belonging to multiple cultures and periods: East and West, ancient and contemporary, figurative and abstract. These elements are not juxtaposed merely to indicate their original sources. Within a single pictorial field, they alter one another’s meanings and establish an entirely new world.

Miyamae connects this relational structure to the way A-POC ABLE approaches making clothes:

A-POC ABLE also creates while continually considering the relationships between material, technology, the body, and the person who wears the garment. ISSEY MIYAKE’s idea of containing diverse possibilities within “a single piece of cloth,” which is completed through the act of wearing, seems to me closely connected to the way Matsuyama’s work expands through its relationship with the viewer.

A-POC stands for A Piece of Cloth. Through computer-controlled production, the elements needed to create a garment can be incorporated into a single continuous piece of fabric in advance, allowing the garment to come into being through its relationship with the wearer’s hands and body.

Matsuyama’s work similarly does not conclude with a fixed meaning contained entirely within the picture plane. The relationships and narratives perceived within it shift according to each viewer’s cultural background and lived experience.

A-POC ABLE contains multiple possibilities within a single piece of cloth, while Matsuyama reconstructs multiple cultural contexts as one visual world. Their most significant common ground is therefore not found in visible motifs or stylistic resemblance. It lies in the mechanism through which meaning emerges between a work and the person who encounters it.

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Reconstructing Painting as the Structure of Cloth, Not Simply Printing It

The newly introduced coats vividly carry the visual language of Matsuyama’s paintings. Yet what has taken place here is not the direct transfer of pictorial imagery onto the surface of a garment.

Miyamae explains the thinking behind the approach:

Clothing is something that changes together with the body. Through the medium of a single piece of cloth, we sought to develop a new form of expression. At A-POC ABLE, material and structure themselves can become expression. By reconstructing Matsuyama's work within a single piece of cloth, we placed great importance on the sense of texture and dimensionality that can only be experienced through wearing it.

The base fabric is vividly printed in a Kyoto workshop before being overlaid with a triangular pattern created through a proprietary technique. As the cloth moves with the body, both its textured surface and the visual appearance of the artwork shift three-dimensionally. Here, the painting is no longer reproduced as a fixed image. It folds, sways, overlaps, and wraps around the body. Different portions emerge depending on whether the wearer is standing still, walking, or raising an arm.

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If faithful reproduction had been the objective, clothing—with its constantly shifting composition and partially obscured imagery—might appear to be an imperfect medium. Yet within this project, that instability is embraced as the very condition from which a new form of expression can emerge.

Asked what he most wanted to preserve when reconstructing his paintings into cloth, Matsuyama answered:

What I wanted to preserve was not the surface image of the painting, but the structure and tension through which different contexts coexist as a single world.

When asked what he was willing to let go, he continued:

On the other hand, rather than preserving the composition or singular viewpoint that had been fixed within the canvas, I chose to relinquish them. Doing so created room for the work to emerge in new relationships through the structure of the cloth and the movement of the body.

The point, then, is not how accurately the original painting can be reproduced. It is to preserve the cultural layering and the tension between disparate images that define Matsuyama's work, while liberating the composition from its fixed position on the canvas. Only then can an entirely new work emerge through the relationship between a single piece of cloth and the human body.

When Painting Acquires a Body, the Conditions That Produce Meaning Change

What happens to a work of art when a two-dimensional painting becomes clothing that envelops the body? Matsuyama's answer offers one of the keys to understanding the project:

Rather than the meaning itself changing into something else, I believe the conditions under which meaning emerges are what change.

As long as a painting remains fixed to a canvas, viewers stand before it and engage with it as a singular image. Their gaze moves between the whole and its details, allowing meaning to unfold over time.

A garment, however, never remains still.

As a painting acquires a body, it departs from the fixed picture plane and begins to assume different expressions through the wearer's movement, physical presence, and relationship with the surrounding environment. Meaning is not confined; it opens itself to new interpretations through the body.

The body is not merely a pedestal for displaying an artwork. Posture, the way someone walks, physique, colour choices, styling, and even the environment in which the garment is worn all shape how the work is perceived. Although two coats may share the same construction and imagery, each establishes different relationships depending on who wears it and where.

Here, A-POC ABLE's philosophy that a garment is completed through wearing intersects with Matsuyama's belief that the work opens itself to new interpretations through the body.

Completion, therefore, is not simply the moment when the designer or artist lays down the final gesture. Expression continues to evolve each time the garment encounters a body and moves through society.

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Encountering a Work in a Museum, Encountering It by Chance on the Street

The project also transforms the distance between artwork and viewer. Speaking about the difference between works encountered in museums and works worn in everyday life, Matsuyama explains that the distinction lies in "the time and distance through which a work reaches its audience."

In a museum, viewers are able to stand before a work and spend time with it.

Museums and galleries are spaces deliberately designed for viewing art. Visitors arrive with the intention of encountering works, and the relationship between artwork and viewer is framed by concentration and stillness.

Clothing creates a fundamentally different relationship.

Clothing, on the other hand, moves together with the body and encounters people unexpectedly in everyday life and public spaces—including those who were never intending to look at art. It is not a question of one being superior to the other. They simply represent different ways in which a work establishes a relationship with society.

Once transformed into clothing, the work leaves the dedicated space of exhibition. It passes commuters on the street, hangs over the back of a chair in a restaurant, waits on a railway platform, and takes on different appearances beneath changing weather and city light. Sometimes it may even enter someone's field of vision without ever being recognised as an artwork.

That element of chance is not a substitute for the museum. It is another way for a work to exist within society.

In the catalogue conversation, Matsuyama also reflects on the idea that art should not exist only within museums but should originally belong more intimately to everyday life. At the same time, he expresses caution toward the risk that fashion can reduce artworks to easily consumable signs or symbols.

For precisely that reason, this project does not simply convert the surface of a painting into a commercial product. Instead, it translates the structure and conceptual foundation of the work into the very nature of clothing. It is an attempt to negotiate the productive tension between opening art to everyday life and reducing it to an easily consumed image.

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“A Single Piece of Cloth” as the Place to Return When in Doubt

In their conversation published in the exhibition catalogue, Miyamae explains that whenever A-POC ABLE collaborates with artists, researchers, or specialists from other disciplines, the philosophy of "A Piece of Cloth" serves as the place to which the team returns whenever uncertainty arises.

Over the years, A-POC ABLE has pursued research and development with fields that exist beyond fashion itself—including engineering, technology, craft, and architecture. While embracing different forms of knowledge opens new possibilities, it also carries the risk of losing sight of what the brand fundamentally seeks to achieve.

That is why everything returns to a single piece of cloth.

Rather than deciding upon a finished form first and then applying technology to realise it, the process begins by asking what possibilities can be contained within one piece of cloth and how those possibilities are transformed once the body enters it.

Returning to that principle allows collaborations across disciplines to remain unmistakably A-POC ABLE.

Matsuyama's work was therefore never placed onto a completed coat as a final layer of decoration. Pattern making, material development, printing, surface texture, and the movement generated once the garment is worn were all explored simultaneously with the question of how his paintings might be reconstructed.

Miyamae describes what became possible through working with an artist:

Through our dialogue with Matsuyama, we repeatedly asked ourselves how the ideas and sensibilities underlying his work could be translated into clothing.

He goes on to stress that the outcome extends well beyond technical innovation:

Collaborating with an artist expands not only the possibilities of technology, but also provides an opportunity to reconsider the meaning and role of clothing itself. Precisely because we come from different disciplines, our ways of thinking stimulate one another, opening the possibility for entirely new forms of creation.

These remarks reveal that A-POC ABLE did not seek art as a means of embellishing or elevating the value of clothing. Through its dialogue with Matsuyama, the project instead reconsiders what clothing can mediate, and what role it might play between the body and society.

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TYPE-XII Expands into Space in New York

The special exhibition at ISSEY MIYAKE / NEW YORK and MADO extends the project's ideas beyond clothing into the exhibition space itself.

Textiles reconstructed from Matsuyama's work through A-POC ABLE's technologies are suspended dramatically from the ceiling. Beneath them stand the coats, now transformed into three-dimensional forms through the body, alongside related paintings and Matsuyama's equestrian sculptures.

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As a single piece of cloth unfolds from above, it is not yet clothing. Once tailored into a coat and worn by the body, what was once a flat image acquires sculptural volume. Displayed alongside Matsuyama's paintings and equestrian sculptures, the garment enters into an entirely new relationship with its point of origin.

MATSUYAMA STUDIO

The exhibition does not present a one-way transformation from painting to cloth or from cloth to garment. Instead, painting, textile, body, sculpture, and architectural space continually refer back to one another, renewing the meaning of each through their circulation.

Limited exclusively to New York, seamless knit T-shirts featuring all seven of Matsuyama's artworks printed onto A-POC garments are also available as part of the project.

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The newly released coats are available in Japan at A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE / KYOTO, ISSEY MIYAKE GINZA / 442, and ISSEY MIYAKE MARUNOUCHI, with international distribution extending to Paris, London, New York, and Milan.

Neither Art Becoming Clothing nor Clothing Becoming Art

We asked both creators a simple question: Has art become clothing—or has clothing become art?

Matsuyama's answer was immediate.

For me, it is neither.

He continues:

To say that 'art became clothing' or 'clothing became art' suggests that one has been replaced by the other. In this project, painting and clothing intersect while preserving their own languages, and it is their relationship itself that has been reconstructed. Neither is subordinate to the other. What has emerged is a new expressive structure existing between them.

Miyamae offers essentially the same response:

It is neither one nor the other. Rather than translating art into clothing or turning clothing into art, this project explores and creates a new form of expression while respecting the distinct territories of both.

Art and clothing have not become identical. Their differences have not been erased, nor have their boundaries been forcibly dissolved. Instead, the project demonstrates how remaining different can itself become the condition for creating new relationships.

Miyamae also reflects on the differing natures of art and clothing:

Clothing is defined by the act of wearing and continues to change together with the body. Art, meanwhile, expands through each encounter with a viewer.

He concludes:

Through the meeting of those two qualities, perhaps what emerged from this project is not a finished object, but a work that continues to grow through the people who wear it. What we sought was not to erase the boundary between art and clothing, but to move back and forth across it, creating new experiences along the way.

Those words define precisely where the TYPE-XII Tomokazu Matsuyama project stands. It is neither a product that blurs the boundary between art and fashion nor an attempt to confer artistic authority upon clothing. Rather, it is an expression born from painting preserving its pictorial structure and clothing preserving its physicality and function, while continually moving between the two.

From left: artist Tomokazu Matsuyama and designer Yoshiyuki Miyamae.
MATSUYAMA STUDIO

A Work That Continues to Change Through the Person Who Wears It

The coats introduced through this project will ultimately be completed as products and released into the world. Yet, as both Matsuyama and Miyamae suggest, that completion is merely a point of departure.

Someone slips an arm into a sleeve. The garment moves with the body through the city. Light catches the surface of the cloth. Layers fold and unfold. Parts of the image that never existed in the original painting come into view. Someone encounters it unexpectedly, and another interpretation begins.

Matsuyama argues that the project does not change the meaning of the work itself—it changes the conditions under which meaning emerges.

Miyamae believes that the possibilities contained within a single piece of cloth are completed through wearing.

Where their thinking converges is not in delivering a finished meaning, but in leaving space within the work for others to participate.

The TYPE-XII Tomokazu Matsuyama project is neither an exercise in translating contemporary art into clothing nor an attempt to elevate fashion into fine art. It proposes a new expressive structure in which painting and clothing retain their own languages while continuing to transform their relationship through the body and society.

Rather than answering whether this is art or clothing, the project invites us to move continually between the two.

In doing so, Tomokazu Matsuyama and A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE suggest that boundaries in creative practice are not lines to be erased, but places where entirely new relationships can begin.