Nagi Noda, Japanese artist and director, has passed away.

The beautiful, eccentric, and talented multimedia artist Nagi Noda has died. Back in 2004 I blogged about video Noda did in which she dressed up like a poodle-person and did aerobics with a chorus line of bipedal poodle people. Her work was weird and wonderful and graceful like that. Lisa Katayama says:

Nagi Noda, talented, internationally famous artist and director who put her own unique artsy-girly high fashion sense on the international art scene map, died on Sunday.

Noda was born in Tokyo in 1973. She went to some really good art schools in the city before establishing her own studio, Uchu Country, in 2003. Since then, she went on to create ads for Nike and Coca-cola, album covers and music videos for artists ranging from Hikaru Utada to the Scissor Sisters, and a whole bunch of creative cool shit like the artsy poodle exercise video I posted a few months ago. In the US, she was represented by Partizan Entertainment and well-known in the NY art scene for being super-fun to hang out with. One of her newest now-posthumous creations is the upcoming album cover for Japanese singer MEG, which comes out on 9/17.

Nagi Noda, super-talented Japanese pop artist, is dead (Tokyomango; thank you Susannah Breslin).

Update: there are some truly amazing comments over at antville, the one about the napkin drawing is really beautiful.

Previously on Boing Boing:

* Mutant panda hybrid toys: Hanpanda
* Poodle-robics

• [Anonymous]

  someone should ask why this hasn’t hit the japanese news at all yet.

• [Talia]

  Dang. That’s awful.

• [Anonymous]

  I am a friend of Nagi Noda. Out of respect to her family i would like to ask you to take down this speculation about suicide. Her family and friends are all grieving her loss and it is very upsetting to find these things on the internet. Please can we just celebrate her life and her genius.
  Thank you.

• [Stevezilla]

  Wow, that’s sad. I thought her HanPanda characters were pretty cool.

• [littlepinkfaery]

  That is so sad. I was really inspired by the wonderful work of Nagi Noda whilst studying drama at university and injected my own versions of her style into a dramatised adaptation of a short story and got an A for my efforts thanks to Nagi.

  I tell everyone about her and am conducting a workshop around her work at my drama class this evening. Her memory will live on in all of us who discovered her and are wowed by her genius, as well as her family.

• [moni]

  its very strange indeed that no japanese media have announced this yet. moderators of her community on mixi (like myspace but japanese) are telling her fans to wait for an official announcement and to not believe the “rumors overseas” quite yet. fans have changed her wikipedia as well, deleting the year of death.

• [moni]

  i should add that the noda nagi community on mixi is unofficial.

• [error404]

  that’s damned shame

• [Nelson.C]

  The TokyoMango link actually goes to Boingboing’s picture. This is the right link.

• [Bonegnawer]

  That’s a horrible shame. And she wasn’t very old, either. How’d she die?

• [Xeni Jardin]

  @#1 thank you I’ve corrected.

• [Anonymous]

  the link to the article says: “Her death was apparently due to complications from surgery she had after a bad car accident last year. She must have known she was going to die, because she got dressed up for it—she was wearing a Mark Ryden dress, Chanel boots, and Viktor and Rolf black lace eyelashes.”
  :(

• [w000t]

  @Bonegnawer: The full post on TokyoMango goes on to give some details:

  Her death was apparently due to complications from surgery she had after a bad car accident last year. She must have known she was going to die, because she got dressed up for it—she was wearing a Mark Ryden dress, Chanel boots, and Viktor and Rolf black lace eyelashes.

  Truly, a performance artist until the end. She will be missed.

• [Sekino]

  Oh, I can’t believe she’s dead: She was so young! I found out about her and her Hanpanda animals a few years back. Pretty haunting, that statement that she might have dresses for death… yet impressive, if it is true. Very sad news altogether. :(

• [scaramanga]

  RIP. That’s incredibly young (I’m much older and don’t feel that old). Why must the talented die so young.