Vast Lives

Some people design letters. CJ Dunn designs for a place.

Recorded on the steps of a Kichijōji café in Tokyo — a neighbourhood he chose deliberately, for its quiet creative energy, and its community of artists — this conversation follows CJ Dunn, a typeface designer originally from Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi, now building a career that moves fluidly between Honolulu, California, New York and Tokyo.

CJ was born on the North Shore of Oʻahu, raised in Pauoa Valley, Kaimuki and in Idyllwild, California.  CJ’s father taught him architectural lettering from a young age. That architectural influence runs through CJ’s work now — he talks candidly about typeface design as an unlikely marriage of the analytical and the aesthetic, drawing lines from art history and modernism, to what he calls the “eye muscle” — a trained, almost athletic sense of visual judgment built through years of practice rather than purely mechanical measurement.

The conversation traces his path from a self-described teenage “skate rat” — punk shows, skateboarding, a deliberate turn away from what he saw as a too-clean-cut ’90s surf industry — back to the ocean and, eventually, to type. It lands on his proudest project to date: a typeface rooted in the land of Hawaiʻi that found its way, unprompted, onto the jerseys and broadcast graphics of the WSL’s Pipe Challenger contest — a full-circle moment for someone who grew up watching surf contests at Pipeline as a kid. CJ makes the case for design that comes from a specific place and a specific community rather than a trend cycle, and for why that specificity is exactly what AI-generated design struggles to replicate.

A conversation about lineage — architectural, cultural, and creative — and what it means to put your own history into the shape of a letter.


Links to topics discussed :

Thrasher April 1986, Hawaiʻi trip: 
https://www.thrashermagazine.com/articles/magazine/april-1986/

CJ met Christian Hosoi on the set of the music video for “Dinosur Jr - Goin Down" which was shot by Atiba Jefferson, CJ is in the crowd shots: 
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2znCWvYiOfI

Sam Clemens, Hawaiʻi skater who rode for Natural Koncept and who won the contest at Aʻala Park: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh5AQBTH36Y

Nike Basketball Battle of the Boroughs project:
https://copterdesign.com/studio/702/nike-battle-of-the-boroughs-harlem-team-branding/

Ed Benguiat, CJ’s typeface design teacher:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHjdoSP-jVc

Wavy lettering CJ did for Vast graphic that turned into the typeface Velzyland:
https://cjtype.com/typefaces/velzyland/

CJ Type x Vast - Worldwide Waveform Network tee:
https://www.vastsurfshop.com/products/vastxcj-dunn-worldwide-tee-black

CJ Type x Vast mixtape:
https://soundcloud.com/cj-type/sets/cjtype-x-vast-mixtape-ss21

Adidas Skate Paraíso video using CJ’s typeface Velzyland:
https://cjtype.com/gallery/adidas-skateboarding-paraiso-video-titles/

Bic using the CJ’s typeface Dunbar:
https://cjtype.com/gallery/bic/

CJ’s Robofont plugin Delorean:
https://github.com/cjdunn/delorean

Undercurrents Hawai’i film series, using CJ’s typefaces Velzyland and Pennypacker:
https://www.instagram.com/undercurrents_hi/

DJ Shadow - Entroducing
https://www.discogs.com/master/15313-DJ-Shadow-Endtroducing

Nokia City Hawaiʻi :
https://www.instagram.com/nokiacity.hello/ 

CJDJ @ Fishcake Hawaiʻi:
https://youtu.be/mf0qqL_PsbA

ʻŌpua typeface collection:
https://cjtype.com/typefaces/opua/

Lexus Pipe Challenger surf contest identity designed for WSL by Kelsey Ige, using CJ’s typeface ʻŌpua Mauka:
https://cjtype.com/gallery/lexus-pipe-challenger-surf-contest/



Photo credits: John Hook, Mark Kushimi, Robert Dunn


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Director / Producer  |  Stephen Schutte
Host                 |  Stephen Schutte
Location          |  Light Up Coffee Kichijōji - Tokyo, Japan
Guest               |  CJ Dunn - Instagram @cjtype
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Some artists paint what they see. DJ paints what she hears.

Recorded at Pridi, a quiet garden coffee shop tucked into Bangkok's Phra Nang Klao Nuea neighbourhood, this conversation follows DJai — a Bangkok-born multidisciplinary artist working across painting, textiles and sound — as she explains a visual language entirely of her own making, one where every sound she hears is translated into a colour, a pitch, a place in a composition.

DJai studied photography before turning to painting, a shift that began during the pandemic, when she moved in to care for her grandmother full-time. Her grandmother has Alzheimer's, and in the quiet of that year, DJ began finger-painting with her on old silk sarongs, watching memory return in fragments whenever her grandmother heard her own name. That experience became the foundation for everything she makes now: a system where sound is assigned colour and pitch, mapped onto MIDI regions in Logic, and painted onto canvas and woven into cloth as a kind of readable, listenable memory.

The conversation moves through her residency in Tainan, Taiwan, where she deliberately worked in a language she didn't speak in order to study its structure; through the Thai pentatonic scale that underpins her colour system; and into her newest body of work, in which she weaves with naturally dyed yarn and plans to source her "sound" from the raw materials themselves — soil, plant, dye — as a way of honouring where they came from. She talks about a piece built entirely from the memory of being told, for the first time, that she was loved. About stripping her weavings into clay to fossilise a conversation between two people who couldn't understand each other's words but understood each other anyway. 

And about Rodriguez, the American musician unknown in his own country who became a household name in South Africa a full generation before Finding Sugarman ever reached him — a detour that becomes its own meditation on how meaning gets assigned, and who gets to assign it.

By the end, what looked like abstract lines and colour blocks resolves into something closer to a diary. Not one you read. One you listen to.

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Director / Producer  |  Stephen Schutte
Host                 |  Stephen Schutte
Location          |  Pridi Coffee Shop - Bangkok Thailand
Guest               |  D-Jai - Instagram @djaikosi
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YouTube        |  @vastlifeofficial
Instagram      |  @vast.life_
Spotify  | https://open.spotify.com/show/7uQq0FR6X6OdK0v5I7S1fI
Apple Podcasts |  https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/vast-lives/id1757876423
Website        |  https://www.vastlife.com
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There's a certain kind of person who doesn't fit neatly into the world around them — not because they're difficult, but because they see things differently. Teppei is one of those people. We met him on a cold riverbank in Tokyo, where he arrived exactly as you'd expect: on his fix gear, no fuss, no gear bag, just the bike. The same bike he rides every day. The same bike he uses to deliver food across the city. The same bike he does tricks on because, for Teppei, the line between utility and expression has always been blurred.

Originally from Odawara — a coastal city near Hakone, southwest of Tokyo — Teppei grew up with skateboarding, BMX, and drawing as his main languages. Not hobbies exactly. More like the only ways of communicating that felt honest. He was the kind of kid who'd get told to do something a certain way and quietly wonder why. Not angry about it, just unconvinced. That instinct — to question the default, to resist the herd mentality without making a scene about it — became the quiet current running through everything he does.

Skateboarding gave him the street. BMX gave him the bike. And somewhere in between, fix gear found him. He talks in this episode about how FGFS — Fix Gear Freestyle — evolved from its origins in messenger culture and track cycling into something far more expressive: BMX-influenced tricks, grinds, bunny hops, spins, all on a single-speed fixed gear bike with pegs. It's a subculture with real depth, real history, and a community that's small but serious. Teppei knows all of it. He's been part of it for years, long enough to watch it almost fade out and then quietly cycle back — with old-school flat tricks and spin-based riding coming back into fashion again.

What makes this conversation land is how understated Teppei is about all of it. He's not performing a lifestyle. He's just living one. He makes small stickers and gives them to people he likes. He draws on the backs of flyers. He rides his fix gear through Tokyo traffic every day — sometimes for deliveries, sometimes just because it's the machine that makes the most sense to him. There's an honesty to the way he describes the fix gear that cuts through: it's not the easiest bike to ride, but that difficulty is part of the point. The connection between rider and machine is direct, immediate, physical. Like skating, but on two wheels. Once it clicks, he says, it feels exactly like you want it to feel.

We also get into the community itself — the Tokyo shops keeping fix gear culture alive, from the OG institution WS to Pasback Yard, a younger operation run by people with serious knowledge, custom frame-building capability, and a sharp aesthetic sensibility. Teppei's recommendation for anyone wanting to get into fix gear is simple: find a shop whose Instagram you like, go in, and talk to people. 

The scene is open to it.
Filmed on a windy afternoon in Tokyo, this is a bilingual episode — Japanese and English — a street-level conversation with a guy who figured out, in his own quiet way, how to build a life out of the things he actually cares about. No blueprint, no audience in mind. Just motion, expression, and a fixed gear that goes exactly where he points it.

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Director / Producer  |  Stephen Schutte
Host                 |  Stephen Schutte
Co-producer & Translation  |  Dave Nurse
Location             |  Japan
Guest                |  Teppei Iwabuchi
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YouTube        |  @vastlifeofficial
Instagram      |  @vast.life_
Spotify        |  https://open.spotify.com/show/7uQq0FR6X6OdK0v5I7S1fI
Apple Podcasts |  https://podcasts.apple.com/za/podcast/vast-lives/id1757876423
Website        |  https://www.vastlife.com
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Some people earn a place in the water. Takayuki Wakita earned a reef.

Born and raised on the Shonan coastline in Kanagawa, Japan, Takayuki grew up treating the ocean as his backyard — swimming through reef tunnels as a kid, watching the windsurfing boom of the 80s from his father's shop window, and eventually making the kind of quiet, decade-long journey to Pipeline that results in something almost unheard of: a section of outer reef named in your honour.
In this conversation, filmed outside Silpheed — the surf and windsurf shop his father founded over 40 years ago, its name meaning "fairy of the wind" — Takayuki talks about what it meant to leave Japan at 18, arrive on the North Shore of Oahu, and slowly earn the respect of one of surfing's most storied lineups. He shares memories of being taken under the wing of Liam McNamara, training mornings with Garrett, sharing barrels with the late Tamayo Perry, and sitting alone in the dark outside Pipeline with his hero Derek Ho — telling him what he meant to him before it was too late.

He talks about humility in a heavy lineup, the lessons a helmet teaches you the hard way, the difference between challenging the ocean and learning from it, and what it means to return home to run a family business while still chasing winter swells on the North Shore.
Takayuki is 54. Still surfing Pipeline. Still showing up.

🔗 Sylphide Surf Shop — links below
📍 Filmed at Katase Kaigan, Shonan, Japan

Vast Lives is a podcast — recorded on location around the world.

In this inspiring conversation, we sit down with Wishulada — social activist artist and creative force based in Nonthaburi, Thailand — whose extraordinary work transforms discarded waste materials into breathtaking sculptures and installations.
From upcycled plastics to everyday throwaway items, Wishulada  weaves together Thailand's rich tradition of handcraft with a powerful message about sustainability, community, and cultural identity. We explore how art can be the universal language that shifts mindsets — especially among younger generations who are losing touch with their roots.

In this episode of the Vastlife Podcast, we sit down with Tapiwa — a man who is genuinely difficult to put in a box, and who would prefer it that way. Originally from Zimbabwe and rooted in Cape Town for over two decades, Tapiwa moves fluidly between food, visual art and sex education — not as separate careers, but as a single, unified mission: to make the lived experience of Afro-descendant people richer, more joyful and more honest.

We met him during a deliberate sabbatical — a conscious uncoupling from the noise of the world — and the timing couldn't have been better for a conversation this deep.
In this conversation we explore:

Why Tapiwa refuses titles — not an artist, not a chef, not an educator — just someone doing the work
Growing up in a vast extended family compound in Zimbabwe, weeding fields before school and learning to live communally — and why that foundation still shapes everything,

The grapefruit philosophy — why sometimes you need to taste things raw, without the sugar coating, to truly understand them.

Street food as one of the most honest expressions of a culture — and what gets lost when food crosses borders.

 The concept of Sankofa — moving forward while carrying the past — and how to do that without dragging the rot with you.

Why anger and hatred are simply too much work, and why joy is the more radical choice
Children as truth-tellers — and why we silence the ones most likely to speak plainly.

Being the eldest son in a patrilineal African family — and what it means to step into that role while disagreeing with most of what it asks of you.

His series "Ancestors in Progress" — and why the ancestral work isn't something you do after you die, it's something you do right now

This is one of the most thought-provoking conversations we've had on Vastlife. Tapiwa doesn't shy away from complexity — he lives in it. And he makes it look like the most natural thing in the world.
Vastlife.com | Stories from people living life on their own terms

In this episode of the Vastlife Podcast, Steve sits down with Atsushi — a longboarder shaped by movement, curiosity, and a refusal to settle.

Raised in the coastal town of Shiratsuka in Kanagawa, his early ambitions lay in football. But years spent commuting into Tokyo, working within the rhythms of retail and routine, led to a quieter realisation — that the path in front of him wasn’t one he intended to follow.

What followed was a deliberate departure. From Japan to Hawaii, through Australia and along the Californian coast, and eventually to Danang, Vietnam — where he has built a life anchored in surfing, simplicity, and self-direction.

It’s a conversation about choosing the long route, about stepping away from expectation, and about the kind of clarity that only arrives once you leave the familiar behind.

In this episode of the Vastlife Podcast, Steve sits down with UG in his coastal studio in Chigasaki, Japan — a quiet, considered space that reflects a life rebuilt with intention.

Raised on the remote Goto Islands, UG once set his sights on professional football, before injury redirected him toward nursing and rehabilitation. What followed was less a pivot than a collapse — burnout, disillusionment, and a period of deep withdrawal that stripped life down to its bare essentials.

What emerges from that low point is a story shaped not by grand gestures, but by small, deliberate steps. A chance encounter. A solo journey across Asia. The slow return of purpose through movement, language, and the sea.

It’s a conversation about endurance, about starting again, and about the quiet discipline required to find your way back.

In this episode, Steve sits down with Samantha — the sole owner of Earth House, one of Bangkok's most enchanting plant-based restaurants. Hidden away behind a towering mango tree and lush vines, Earth House is more than a restaurant — it's a philosophy made manifest.

Born in Texas to a Swiss father and Mexican-Native American mother, Samantha grew up barefoot on the beaches of Pattaya, Thailand. She's always marched to the beat of her own drum — and that spirit is woven into every corner of this extraordinary space she built from the ground up (literally, from a shell of pillars and a big hole in the ground).

In this conversation we explore:

How Samantha went plant-based 10 years ago and built a restaurant around whole, real ingredients — no fake meats, no shortcuts

Earth House's organic farm project on the outskirts of Bangkok, run in partnership with a children's charity that benefits from the produce they grow

A carefully curated wine list of 34 biodynamic and natural wines — because great plant-based dining deserves the full experience

The wild renovation story behind the space — and why a single mango tree changed everything

What keeps her passion alive, her team culture, and what's next for the Earth House brand

"Nature always wins" — and Samantha is living proof that if you pour enough soul into something, it blooms.

Find Earth House Bangkok: www.earthhousebangkok.com
Vastlife.com | Stories from people living closer to the earth

#EarthHouse #Bangkok #PlantBased #VastLife #SustainableFood #FarmToTable #VeganRestaurant #BangkokEats #WomenInBusiness #NatureAlwaysWins

Frank Solomon is a disruptor. Starting his journey out as a professional surfer Frank quickly found his resolve in doing what matters most to him. Community leader, humanitarian and sustainability spokesperson.

His seat of motivation behind Sentinel Ocean  Alliance is recognising the need to get involved with the underprivileged community in his hometown of Hout Bay , South Africa. They say charity begins at home - for Frank this is more than that. This is about a grass route upliftment program backed by Parley.tv 

''My goal is to provide a platform, a stepping stone for kids who have suffered at the hands of poverty and wealth mismanagement. In the hope that those who choose to embrace the path will go on to become the disruptors that motivate and drive change' in a positive way'. says Solomon.