The Japanese textile universe, with its richness and variety of fabrics and prints, is the latest facet of Japanese culture to be presented at Japan House São Paulo through the exhibition "NUNO – Contemporary Textile Poetics," on view from August 20 to October 27, 2019. The exhibition highlights pieces created by Japanese designer Reiko Sudo, from the brand NUNO (a word meaning "fabric" in Japanese), which develops aesthetic lines, materials, and techniques, often reinterpreting Japan's textile tradition for the contemporary world.
Curated by design critic and historian Adélia Borges and Mayumi Ito, consultant and founder of the community project Amaria, the exhibition features 35 different fabrics made from raw materials ranging from bashofu (banana fiber produced on Amami Island in Japan’s Kagoshima Prefecture) and newspaper pages to washi (Japanese paper), stainless steel, plastic, rubber, and feathers, as well as traditional materials like cotton, silk, polyester, wool, and felt. The exhibition underscores NUNO’s unique contribution to contemporary global design with a selection of fabrics that highlights the diversity of techniques, textures, materials, and colors, including artisanal, semi-industrial, and industrial production methods. To display such a rich and extensive variety of pieces, architect Pedro Mendes da Rocha, responsible for the exhibition design, drew inspiration from the organic nature of life to present a large tree on the cultural center's ground floor, with "branches" and "foliage" represented by 3.5-meter-wide panels, each featuring a different fabric.
