The Man From Shinjuku - Pawel Kalinowski

It happens often: when presented with a new art project, our jaded eyes roll, because it’s all been done before. But genuine creation is never done, is always radical, and is prone to bursting like a flowering weed through cracks in the expected.  For example; Luftgekühlt, the air-cooled Porsche extravaganza, is cool for what it is, even within its boundaries of ‘acceptable’ creativity – ‘outlaw’ cars stickered with old racing graphics, rally cars that never existed, etc.  We smile, we enjoy, but rarely do a double-take.  But when something new demands a triple-take, and begs more questions the longer you look, then you’ve found a gem.

So it was with encountering Pawel Kalinowski’s Ghost Layer of Shinjuku, debuted at Luftgekühlt Tokyo earlier this year. It’s a real WTF project: a badly rusted-out 1960s Porsche 356 chassis, littered with clues in glass jars – photos, letters, ephemera – suggesting the car had been part of a race, Shinjuku.  A story begins to emerge from the clues, that this wasn’t a real race, and the driver a fiction, but like all great fiction, an intriguing story forms: a young man rejecting his family’s expectations to go to school and join a business, who chooses instead to go racing.  We’re already there, we know this story, it’s our story, somehow.

That’s the genius of Pawel Kalinowski at work: he’s supplied just enough clues through his found-object Shinjuku sculpture to draw the viewer in and leave them wanting more.  He’s happy to oblige, in his own time.  First with the Contact Layer of Shinjuku rally, where twelve people in seven classic Porsches (and a filmmaker) spent seven days on the road, driving over 4000 kilometers through Central and Eastern Europe.  The next clues are coming in the first week of October at Luftgekühlt Atlanta, where Kalinowski will add another layer to the Shinjuku story with an art installation hidden under a debut sheet…that will not be removed.  The actual revelation will be installed at a remote Medieval castle in Poland two weeks later, which he does not expect will be attended, except for invited media.  Soon after that it’s Art Week in Tokyo in early November, where the Shinjuku project gets a fuller view, and discussions begin with collaborators to make this ephemeral project ‘real’, meaning the fiction is explored out via a manga book, or perhaps a film.

The Shinjuku Porsche is a thought exercise, a work of poetry written in rust, a dream catcher. But ultimately it is an Art Car, in the grand tradition of such since their 1920s origin with Sonia Delaunay, right through to the infamous BMW cars by Calder and Warhol.  But Kalinowski’s project is unlike any of these, being more literary than painterly, and stimulating more questions than answers.  This is not an Art Cars as an expression of a visual artists’ handiwork, although he is a trained visual artist: the Shinjuku car is a story, that for the moment exists only in the mind.  While making that story ‘real’ via a book or film is a natural progression, for these next few months Shinjuku exists only as a spirit.  It lives in the mind only, which is a beautiful thing too.

On discovering the Shinjuku project, I was excited: how unusual to find a seemingly humble artist delivering a truly unique project at a Porsche festival.  So I reached out, and Pawel was happy to explain his process and project: the following interview was conducted Sept. 4, 2026.

Paul dOrléans (PDO): So your primary business is graphic design?

Pawel Kalinowski (PK): I’m the founder and creative director for CarBone. We design and produce parts and interiors for classic Porsches. I’m also a classic Heuer stopwatches collector, probably the biggest in Europe.  Probably it is a mental issue.

PDO: Isn’t all collecting a mental issue?

PK: Yeah, that is correct. What I do as well, I’m a graphic designer; I graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in our city (Łódź – pronounced ‘woodzsh’ – Poland).

PDO: I spent 5 weeks in Poland in 1987, so I caught the ‘cześć‘ (hi/bye) on the seat of your strawberry Porsche – so charming and really different.  Did you design all that?

PK: No, that’s from a brand of a close friend in our city; Pan Tu Nie Stał. Fun fact – the brand name means refers to the communist era: you’re familiar probably with the fact we had queues then. I mean lines to get anything.

PDO: Oh yeah, I stood in the queue for pivo (beer) every Thursday.

PK: So, Pan Tu Nie Stał basically means ‘you were not here in that line’.

PDO: I love it, what a reference.

PK:  They do cool stuff, and I know the owner. They had a line of jackets with a strawberry theme, and I asked if he still had some the fabric, and he was like ‘help yourself, whatever you want!’ So I was lucky, I wanted it badly in my car, and it fit perfectly.

PDO: Nobody ever made a strawberry-themed Porsche, especially with that bouclé / fleece interior! It’s really cheeky.

PK: And refreshing. I follow a lot of vintage car media, and a lot of times it’s just oppressive. Because it’s not especially creative; it’s an echo chamber, kind of self-congratulation. So when I see something that is refreshing and an innovation and fun, I’m really attracted.

PDO: I also went to art school, and my bent on The Vintagent is towards art history and culture. I think it’s really important to explore the impact of culture in both directions; motoring on culture, culture on motoring, and all the subcultures that develop around vehicles. That’s been a fascination of mine, as explored in my books Ton Up! and The Chopper: the Real Story.  So I’m fascinated with what’s happening with Porsche culture now, with all these little spin-off subcultures: rally, outlaw, racer, etc.  How interesting that this brand became a medium for expression and adventure – and Porsche the company is the lucky recipient.  You can see something like that with Harley-Davidson; you’ve got Sturgis and so many spin-off subcultures that keep that brand alive.  No other American motorcycle brand survived the 1950s, but H-D did partly because they had all this cultural support.  So I really resonated with what you’re doing – it’s fascinating to me. I also write fiction, so I see you as creating manga or a novel with the Shinjuku project.  Are you planning to create a corollary piece, like a book or animated film?

PK: Yes actually, I’m working on it. I’ll go to Japan on Tuesday, and I always try to combine visiting a place with things I need to do, and things I want to do, and with other things I should do.  The most obvious thing on the list will be Japanese guys who helped me with the first chapter of Shinjuku project. They found me a donor car to be painted, right in Tokyo, in February this year.

PDO: I saw a 911 that you were hand-painting in Japan, with guys in a shop, is that them?

PK: Yes, they invited me for a world premiere of a car project by Yoshizawa-san, based on a Porsche 912. Sneaker designer Sean Wotherspoon was invited to redesign the interior of that car, plus the chassis, colorfully combining materials: jeans, corduroy, leather etc.  A beautiful build.  They invited me, and I’ve learned when a Japanese person from that crowd invites you, you do not say no.  You have to go.

Our cultures (American and Polish) are very similar, but Japan is totally different. I have a good example: when I finished painting that Japanese car, there were tins of paint left over. I cleaned up my stuff and said to the to the guys, ‘Hey I cleaned my stuff. I will leave the paint cans.’  But they said ‘Hold on, wait a second.’  They were in a group talking like 5 minutes. One of them came back and said ‘The owner of the garage would be honored if you could take your cans with you.’  And I think, what just happened?  Hey you just watched the process in Japan. So I have no idea where the conversation with the manga artists will take me, because I do not understand that culture.  Keep your fingers crossed for success.

I found a home for Contact Layer during Tokyo Art Week, at at Le Garage, November 4-8. Even better, the installation will sit next to a staircase designed by Shiro Kuramata, which feels like a wonderful accident considering the design/cultural layer of the whole project. Plus I will meet a manga artist there.

PDO: The manga thing is so huge in Japan, we in the West don’t really understand how deeply integrated mango is in their culture.  For comparison in the United states, we don’t even see how deeply Disney animation has impacted our own culture.

PK: In Japan they understand this is not just for kids, this impacts everyone. It’s incredibly popular so they understand how important it is, it’s almost like national identity, it’s not belittled. It’s like, ‘this is something we created and it’s massive’.

PDO: There was a fabulous Art of Manga exhibit at the DeYoung museum here, with all the important manga artists from the very start of the genre. The show explored how critical this art form has become in Japan, it impacts everything, it’s in conversation everywhere. And part of their culture is acknowledging the things that are important; a person can become a national treasure supported by the state, I mean this is inconceivable in the United states, here it’s like ‘you make your own money, you make your own reputation.’

So, given that you’ve laid the foundation for a story, it seems so natural to fill out that story.  But when you tell that story, for better or worse it becomes fixed; I like the poetry of there really isn’t a story in Shinjuku, you just installed suggestive phrases in the car, and let people’s imaginations take over.  Once you define the story well, it becomes fixed, but still leaves open the possibility of other characters, or even other viewpoints.  Kind of like Rashomon (I worship Kurosawa’s films) – the same story told from 7 perspectives.

PK: It’s so easy to create a visual story now – not a handmade animation though, that’s difficult – but nowadays a really good anime, they can put something out quickly that’s amazing.

PDO: So why Porsche in particular?

PK:  That is a good question; probably because of my older brother.  When I was six years old, he was 12, and he told me once a Porsche 911 is the best car in the world. From my perspective, being six years old, he was an adult.  And you know, the location is crucial; in that story, we were in a communist country, with nothing, with no hopes. I remember the lines to get meat, I remember my brother in the line with our mother, crazy long lines.  And everything was always about to be sold out.  You stayed in line and you waited, because maybe there will be a miracle and something will appear.  Money wasn’t a problem, because there was nothing to buy.  Because we had nothing, we didn’t have hope for anything to change.  My father spent two nights in jail because he made a pair of jeans by himself!

PDO: When I was in Poland in 1987, literally everyone we met had spent time in jail for something stupid like that.

PK:  Just in case, just a friendly reminder!

PDO: It was a different universe.  I visited because I wanted to see and understand this other world, the Eastern Bloc, that was supposedly our ‘enemy’.  What’s really going on over there?  And in the end you find it’s just people dealing with their situation, just like everywhere else in the world. I was very glad I went, because I understand exactly what you’re talking about. I had a Dutch friend who had visited Poland around the same time, he called it ‘no money nothing to buy Poland’.  No one had any money, and there was nothing to buy anyway.

PK: A fun fact, you didn’t need any money but somehow everything appeared by itself.  You could always find people who were able to help. The next chapter of that story is when I was 33, in 2014, my partner and I had a creative agency.  We worked on boring stuff for big companies, for stupid money.  Believe me, nobody needed this stuff, but they paid well.  We used to design apps, we used to make websites – for KFC, Pepsi, Roche, all of those brands. But I felt ‘this is not what I was born to do.’  This is not my thing, but the money’s good. Golden handcuffs.

Maybe that’s a first-world problem, but I didn’t feel good, so decided it was about time to make one of my dreams come true, so I bought my first 911; it was 1983 SC, a Targa, and I decided to work on the car by myself, with no knowledge. If I fucked it up I will find someone to fix it, and so I thought it was a good idea.  I started preparing a list of parts I wanted to change, and as I prepared the list, one part was impossible to get: a set of technical stickers. Five boring stickers: one of them says ‘firing order’, another one ‘oil temperature’…I didn’t I think was it possible that nobody had recreated them, so I thought maybe I should recreate them to have a correct set for my car?  You could get some reproductions but they weren’t even close to the original. Being a graphic designer, the spaces between letters were wrong, so created them to look exactly like originals. I had to source the material to to print on, and I found a printing house that could make them, but the guy from the printing house said ‘hey Pavel, I can’t print you 5, I can only print 500.’  So I was like fuck it, let’s buy 500, and suddenly I’m in the sticker business! I wanted my 5 stickers and didn’t think about the rest, but I posted 495 stickers for sale on the Pelican Parts Forum, a Porsche forum, with the question ‘maybe you guys need these stickers?’  It turned out everybody needs those stickers, so instead of working on my car I started recreating stickers for Porsches, and I felt super happy.  Somebody appreciates what I do, compared to those crazy projects we had with big brands. Here, everybody’s happy; I’m happy, the customers are happy, the printing house guy is happy, because I’m happy telling him ‘hey people in the world love your stickers’. So I thought I would go deeper; I talked with my partner and he said go for it, investigate it, maybe there’s a business for us here, and maybe we can abandon the corporate projects.

PDO:  So you pulled on a thread to see where it led.

PK: And customers were inspired, asking us a lot of questions, like ‘maybe you can make me stickers for the body of my Porsche?’  Yes, with pleasure! Other guys asked if I can design changes to their car – how to lower it, or change wheels in Photoshop.  Nowadays we have ChatGPT which is easier, you don’t need to have any pictures, you can you just type a color code and say what wheels and it does the job. But somebody asked me to design the interior in colors that would look good with that body color?  Then ‘hey maybe it would be a good idea if I leave my Porsche at your place and you can work on it?’  I never said no.

We still do a lot of stickers for Porsches, and we don’t have our own printer because I always say ‘if you want to sell milk you don’t need to have a cow’. Imagine all of those problems when need to fix your printer – that takes a specialist.  We do 3D print a lot of parts, including aluminum and stainless steel, titanium, we print using resin, we send those parts all over the world, but we do not have a production printer, we just have a small shitty $200 printer to do simple prototypes.

So sticker printing was the first manifestation. We are strong at finding needs, or what would be cool, and people somehow think that our work is cool.

PDO: Because you’re an artist and know what’s aesthetically appealing.

PK: We established CarBone in 2014, and we struggled with many problems.  We had our mechanic’s garage, we hired a team of 13 mechanics, but we don’t want to do that anymore. We started making making super good money because we had crazy customers.  One of the clients in 2020 sent us a message, ‘hey I just I just lost my job because of COVID, so now I have loads of time working on my car, I want to buy this that that’, a huge list.  Me being from a poor country I think like ‘I will save all of my money’ but they had a different mentality, they were confident they could make more money in the future.

When you’re 20 years old you’re different than 30, and now I’m in my 40s, and our business is stable. We hire bright people, and built from scratch a new structure for the company, and I am not in charge anymore.  Our organism works without us, but we spent a lot of time creating those processes. We tried amazing ideas that didn’t work, we had stupid ideas that worked, and finally I started having time for feeding that other part of me.  That’s when the Shinjuku series appeared.

PDO: What was the trigger for Shinjuku?

PK: My friend had a Porsche 356, and had just returned from Japan. We started talking about what Tokyo is, and that conversation became one of the triggers for Shinjuku. He said ‘Hey I just bought this car, please make me something impactful.’  That was the trigger. I started thinking about a person from the 1960s taking part in a rally, and I thought through the liveries of those times. Another trigger was they announced a Luftgekühlt show in Tokyo.

I’ll tell you a secret – there will be a teaser of the next chapter of Shinjuku at Luftgekühlt in Atlanta on Oct 10, and I will show a car under a white cloth, but what is under the tarp will never be revealed. I’ll project images from Contact Layer of Shinjuku from the interior, onto the windows.

PDO: I saw a photo from your installation, with the 356 covered in TV monitors, and there was another car with some kind of projection from the inside; very cool. I love the presentation of this story as an art installation, it’s amazing.

PK: Thank you so much. We’re bringing the next phase of Shinjuku to Atlanta.  Normally people say ‘there will be a great premiere in Paris, in London, in New York’, those kinds of places.  I want to do things the opposite way, I want to do a teaser in Atlanta, to say there will be an actual premiere in the middle of nowhere in Poland on October 24th.  We have a great spot, Reszel Castle from the Middle Ages. I expect nobody to actually come to that installation, but it makes sense, because you need space and silence to understand the exhibit. Later we’ll take it to some museum or art gallery. But first, we’ll invite people to that town, and after that take the installation to Art Week in Tokyo.

I can tell you another secret: the last chapter of the Shinjuku project will involve a rally next year. The plan is just a few cars, we want to go from Europe through Mongolia to Japan.

PDO: Whoa, that’s like the Peking to Paris Rally in reverse.

PK: The opposite way, yes similar.  A big difference between a Slavic culture and American culture is when we say things like that, it is a statement, it will happen.

PDO: That’s a fair criticism. We talk a lot, and sometimes it happens.

PK: I don’t mean it is good or bad, it is just different, because our cultures are different. and it’s the key to understand each other.  I mean, you’ve probably traveled everywhere in the world, I assume?

PDO: Yes many places.

PK: It helps to understand the cultures; why people are how they are.

PDO:  We live half the year in Mexico, mostly because we love Mexican culture and are fascinated by this place that’s right next door to the United States, and is looked down upon by both the government and by a lot of the Americans. But when you actually go there, you discover Mexico City is like Athens or Cairo or Rome – it’s built on top of thousands of years of history.  The Mexicans are finally taking ownership of their own history, with a real pride in their mix of cultures, and it’s a really interesting time to be in Mexico; in Poland you know your medieval history, it’s deep in your consciousness, but that’s not really so true in Mexico because of the intense colonial period, where all that was erased. But there’s 63 actively spoken languages in Mexico, and they’re just really digging in on that. The United states is a country of immigrants with this terrible attitude towards immigration, it’s kind of self-hating.

PK: I’m Slavic, I do not soften anything; Europe has its own issues the same way. It is a shit show. We have a saying in Poland, ‘I am not tomato soup,’ meaning I’m not for everybody.

PDO: I have not been to Poland since 1987, so I know it’s a totally different place, but I really loved riding on the small country roads.  Some of those moments were amazing: I remember on the way to Malbork castle, we rode by a man who was plowing a field with horses, and it was approaching sunset and the light was golden, and the road was lined with big plane trees. I thought ‘I’m looking at a Courbet painting’, like what century am I in? I’m on a motorcycle but he’s doing what people have been doing there for 1000 years. I was very grateful to witness that.

PK:  My latest project is about collecting those moments; when someone smokes cigarettes in a forest, or remembering the smell of the mountains.  What you remember is never what you expect to remember, and often it’s in insignificant details, but they’re profound, like touchstones, like magic keys to the past.  That is Shinjuku.