'IN CHINA, THE fluorescent tube is everywhere,' says lighting designer Ingo Maurer. 'It's like a Hopper painting when you go to a restaurant - it's so ugly and strong, but impressive in some way.' On a visit to Japan, where his career is being celebrated in a touring exhibition at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Maurer is only too happy to talk about China, a constant source of inspiration. 'I remember 20 years ago when I visited Hong Kong, you had these massive apartment blocks built on the hills at Aberdeen,' he says. 'At night, seen from the distance you had the cold, icy light towers of these apartments, all moving with the flickering of televisions. I thought it was beautiful to look at from the distance, but I wouldn't want to live there. Thankfully, things are starting to change.' China is the next stop on Maurer's Asia itinerary, with visits to Shanghai and Hong Kong, where he's working on a major artistic project using light. 'We have a contract, so all I can say is it's a large, very surrealistic project for some serious art collectors,' he says. The Tokyo show, entitled Light - Reaching for the Moon, has visited several European cities, and will move to Osaka after Tokyo. With about 120 items, it gives a comprehensive overview of the award-winning designer's work going back four decades, and features rare prototypes, serially produced lamps and one-off pieces, as well as models, photographs and films. What sets Maurer apart from other successful designers, such as his close friend Philippe Starck, is that he's chosen to devote himself to just one area of design. But looking at his ingenious hanging bulbs, lampshades made from the most unlikely materials, lights embedded in glass tables with no obvious source of current, and many other startling designs, it's clear to see that for the still sprightly and energetic 74-year-old and his design team, being limited to light hasn't been a problem. Trained as a typographer, Maurer, who was born on the island of Reichenau in Lake Constance, between Germany and Switzerland, started working in design as a self-taught freelancer while living in the US in the early 1960s. But it was only after his return to Europe that he had the inspiration that truly set him on his path to stardom. Almost like the cartoon symbol, his first great inspiration was literally a light bulb above his head. 'I was lying in a cheap pensione in Venice,' he says, recalling the moment back in 1966 when he had the idea for his first truly successful design. 'I had eaten and drunk well and I was high. The crickets were chirping. I had drunk a nice Tokai, then I was struck by the light bulb hanging from the ceiling. It seemed to look much larger than normal.' The result was Bulb (1966), a table lamp that expanded the motif of the bulb to the whole lamp, creating what looks like a giant freestanding light bulb. He talks about the visual appeal of the bulb as the 'perfect union of technology and poetry', and its form is a recurring theme in his work. One of the most successful subsequent works in this vein is Lucellino (1992), a frosted light bulb on a curved wire stem, decorated with delicately made wings of goose feather, that is also used as the basic component of larger installations such as Birdie (2004). The obvious Pop Art characteristics of Bulb prompted New York's MoMa to add it to its collection four years after its inception. In the same year of its design, Maurer set up his company, Design M, in Munich, later eponymously renamed as his reputation grew. The strength of Maurer as a designer is that his work includes elements of stripped-to-the-bone minimalism as well as richly poetic and allusive visual elements. For example, several works in the exhibition reference his long-standing fascination with Asian art and aesthetics. L'Eclat Joyeus (2005) uses broken Chinese porcelain figures and plates to create a dynamic lampshade, while Blushing Zettel'z (1997/2005) uses images inspired by an erotic porcelain figure he found on a trip to China, and artfully sets them around the light source. Tableaux Chinois (1989) references Chinese aesthetics, setting floating mirrors on a fishpond and projecting the patterns created onto a wall. This mesmerising work achieves one of Maurer's cherished goals of making light visible and 'giving it substance'. 'I called it Tableaux Chinois because it reminded me of a Chinese ink painting,' he says. 'Each moment is a new work.' Although individual inspiration has been the wellspring of his work, Maurer's almost obsessive need to be independent has led him to build his design company into a major enterprise. This allows him to do what he wants, but, at the same time, it adds to his risks and responsibilities, making him sometimes painfully aware of the conflict between art and business. 'I have to pay my bills,' he says. 'I have 60 to 70 people working for me. But I try to make as little compromise as possible. If there is some kind of terrible stinker, I won't do it.' How does a famous designer say no to a project worth a lot of money? 'There was one I didn't like,' he says, referring to the Hamburger Hof project (2000). 'It was a shopping mall refurbishment in Hamburg. It was horrible. I didn't feel as if I wanted to participate because I didn't like the people who owned it, so I just scribbled a throwaway design and sent it to them, hoping that it would be rejected.' Despite the spirit in which he did it, Maurer's design was extremely ambitious, requiring major architectural changes to drive two large skylight wells through several floors of offices. This would normally have been an additional reason for the design to be rejected. However, the owners were impressed and accepted it, with the result that Maurer was drawn in to the job initially against his will - although he admits that, ultimately, this was a good thing. Since the 90s, he has increasingly become involved with large architectural-style projects, the best known being the lighting for the Westfriedhof Subway Station in Munich in 1998. Here, he conformed to the client's request to use the fluorescent tubes he so detests. He much prefers halogen or light-emitting diodes (LED), two technologies he's helped introduce and popularise. 'Why do people try to improve on natural light?' he says, referring to the flickering, partial spectrum light created by fluorescent tubes. Faced with this problem, he skilfully ameliorated the ugly fluorescent glare by using large aluminium dome caps with brightly painted inner surfaces as oversized light shades, giving the unstable light in each dome a rich stable colour. Some see this quest to refract, soften, and mediate the insistence of light as the essence of Maurer's work. This is one reason he's attracted to Asia, where many cultures make use of paper lanterns. Inspired by the akari lamps of the Japanese sculptor Isamu Noguchi, Maurer has produced several highly artistic designs constructed from paper, handmade using Japanese techniques. He's named this 1998 series MaMo Nouchies, a pun on Noguchi's name. The series includes the elegant Wo-Tum-Bu, which are equally at home in modernist interiors and traditional Asian settings. 'I like the light they produce,' he says. 'Dead light drains you of emotion. That's why I decided to make lamps using Japanese paper. People called up and said, 'Our conferences have become much more inspired, thanks to your light.' So it definitely works.' Maurer: Light - Reaching for the Moon, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (www. operacity.jp/en/ag). Ends Sept 18
