Nippon Vending Machine
Editorial, Personal
Nippon Vending Machine began as a class assignment to reprint a personally meaningful photograph as a screen print. The image, a roadside vending machine shot in Okinawa on an analogue Olympus mju-II, captures the quiet charm of everyday life in Japan, and the convenience that vending machines stand for in East Asian daily culture.
Institution
Sint Lucas Antwerpen
Location
Belgium
Year
2024
Working with printmaking coach Gerard Leysen, the photograph was broken into digital separations and converted into halftone dots for CMYK screen printing. Turning a continuous tone snapshot into a grid of dots gave the scene a more graphic character, closer to a printed object than a photograph.
The layers were printed in the order of cyan, yellow, magenta, and finally black. Yellow stayed off the first layer to make alignment easier, and black went last to avoid smudging. The vending machine's vivid red is not a separate ink: it emerges where yellow and magenta overprint, and becomes the visual anchor of the piece.
Hand printing pressure during the cyan layer varied from print to print, and the four layers never registered perfectly. Some prints feel bright and lively, others cooler and more melancholic. Bound together with classmates' work, the set became a small exhibition in book form, a reminder that in screen printing, no two prints are ever quite the same.
Credits
Graphic Designer
Technical Coach
Print Studio
Jian-Xin Wang
Gerard Leysen
Zeefdruk Werkplaats, Sint Lucas Antwerpen