Suprlife Studios Restores the Greatest Japanese Cars Ever Built
Raphael Orlove
The cars that come out of Kemal Taskent’s Suprlife Studios are some of the best in the world, imbued with a level of care and detail rarely seen lavished upon classics from Japan. Just don’t call them restorations.
“I don’t like to use the restoration word,” Taskent (his friends call him K) tells me from inside his shop in Maplewood, New Jersey, a tall cup of tea in hand from the Wawa across the street. “I don’t like restoration only because I don’t feel like I’m doing it justice. […] I was an apprentice for seven, eight years in an actual restoration shop, and I know what a real restoration is.”
That was at a spot around the corner called JS Automotive, a specialty shop that turned out 1930s Fords and other Americana from the ‘50s and ‘60s. “It’s a six-figure, huge, three-year build and every single panel gets addressed. And I’ve done it. I’ve been a part of it. I’ve put out cars like that.” This work is not what K does anymore.
The problem with full restorations, K explains, is that putting so much time and money into these vehicles renders them almost too precious to drive. K likes to use his cars and started putting together his own work on the side under the title Suprlife. He turned his expertise to Japanese imports from the ‘80s and ‘90s. They might have been show-level builds, but they weren’t so expensive that you’d be afraid to drive them. K’s rolling canvas was his personal Toyota Aristo, which he daily-drove on the streets of Brooklyn. He still has it, and his signature hand-painted roof gleams in the winter sun outside the shop.
It was his boss at JS Automotive who encouraged him to strike out on his own and take the lease on a nearby garage he owned. K opened it up in 2020 as Suprlife Studios and bought it outright in October of 2023.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove It’s funny – when K was apprenticing at JS Automotive in the 2010s, the big money was in vintage American iron. Now the market has turned towards the Japanese classics he has always loved. “It’s like a mainstream thing now,” K laughs. “My dad knows these cars now. And he’s a car guy! He never knew what a fucking Skyline was.” More and more customers are turning up at K’s door, happy to drop $25,000 to have their car redone.
That’s around what the owner of the gorgeous blue R34 in the shop is paying, K says, and it’s an intensive job. Body panels fixed with spray foam trapped water and rotted the fenders from the inside out. The gas cap had been repaired with a door hinge from a garden shed. When these cars were cheap and disposable, that was the life they led. Now that they’ve become six-figure classics, freshly legal under America’s 25-year import ban, it’s K’s job to undo those years of neglect.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove While production cars like that blue R34 were well-made but abused while they were cheap, many of the most rare and desirable vehicles of Japan’s ‘90s and ‘00s heyday were never built with longevity in mind. Take, for example, the one-off silver Skyline GT-R station wagon taking center stage on the shop floor. K normally works through four “big builds” like the blue R34 per year. This is the workflow he enjoys, and he avoids the multi-year projects that tied him down at JS Automotive. It’s an impressive throughput given that he only works 50 hours a week and for the past few years he’s chosen to be the shop’s sole employee. The R33 Skyline wagon, by contrast, has been here since late 2022.
It’s a piece of tuner car history. Built as a show car by the owner of Option Magazine, the Skyline wagon was thrown together with little thought given to someone like K nearly 30 years down the line. K took on the job for nearby auto importer Inbound Motorsports, not expecting such an iconic vehicle to be so shabby under the skin.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove “I’m pretty much redoing the whole important piece of the car, which was the wagon portion, which was done really bad back then. It didn’t age well,” K explains. “Nothing against the builder. It was just meant to be a quick show thing. It was for a Tokyo Auto Salon in ‘97, and it was only meant to be for that show.”
K found huge chunks of the car built out of foam and nothing else. K is taking that all down and building it back up in metal and fiberglass.
“[After TAS ‘97], it got picked up for a video game and it got picked up for some other things, and then some other brands put their name on it and then it just got put away,” says K. “So it just sat with shitty work for a very long time and it just started to crack and fall apart.”
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove It’s a similar story for the Toyota MR2 at the front of the shop. Japan’s legendary drag racing shop Veilside built it as a demo car for the ‘98 Tokyo Auto Salon. It’s a piece of Veilside’s history long before its two-tone RX-7 became famous in Tokyo Drift. After this MR2 had its show debut, there wasn’t much for it to do. It was all but abandoned until Inbound Motorsports brought it Stateside and convinced K to return to show quality.
While K can order complete reproduction body panels for that blue R34 Skyline, everything on the MR2 is custom. Its warped fiberglass has to be repaired by hand. Like the R33 wagon, the MR2 is being brought up to better-than-new condition. The original stickers were getting cracked, and rather than make new ones that will also fade, K is replicating them in paint. As much as K says he doesn’t do restorations, he has stripped the car down, repainting and refinishing deep under the skin. When it is fully reassembled, nobody will see these details. Only K will know they’re there. It might be the most care and attention anybody has ever given to an MR2.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove But K does the work not because others see newfound value in these cars. He does it because these are the cars he has always cherished. It has taken him a lot to get here, and he is proud that he can support himself with their care. The work is its own reward.
“I’ll come here and get a tool,” K says, looking back at the MR2 across the shop, “and I’ll turn around. And even just in that walk back, it’s all worth it.”
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Suprlife Studios
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Image Credit: Suprlife Studios Suprlife Studios
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Suprlife Studios
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Suprlife Studios
