The Goodwiller (
@thegoodwiller ) is a collaborative project by Shiho Saito (
@saishiho ) and Misako Taoka (
@taoka_misako ). Saito, trained in printmaking and working with silkscreen, and Taoka, whose practice spans graphic design and editorial work, each maintain independent practices while collaborating since 2019 on projects that critically engage with secondhand clothing.
Initiated during an artist-in-residence program in Portland, USA, their work is developed through intensive, site-specific production. Since its inception, the project has expanded to Tokyo, Paris, Seoul, and Bangkok. In each location, garments are sourced from thrift stores, assembled into outfits, and photographed. The clothes are then tagged with original labels and serial numbers and returned to the same stores, re-entering circulation. These processes are documented through photographs and texts and published as a series of archival books titled The Goodwiller, with five issues to date. The books are conceived in relation to each site’s cultural and social context. More recently, their practice has extended to workshops, exhibitions, and The Goodwiller Archives, in which motifs from secondhand garments are transferred via silkscreen onto other garments or ceramics and recirculated as products.
A key aspect of their practice lies in returning garments to circulation after documentation. Their interest in secondhand clothing stems from the understanding that such garments already move among multiple users—worn, discarded, and passed on. Rather than extracting them from this cycle, The Goodwiller inserts a moment of transformation before returning them to circulation. The tagged garments pass into the hands of anonymous others, often without awareness of their status as artworks. Even the artists cannot trace their trajectories. In this sense, the work resides not in the garments as objects, but in the processes that produce situations in which one unknowingly comes to possess an artwork, in the zines that document these processes, and in the relationships that unfold as the garments are worn again in everyday life.
Photo by
@yutarosaito
Text by Sen Isozumi
@72yearsold 
