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Nuno's unique textiles interweave art and craft, tradition and technology.
By Maggie Kinser Hohle
February 2003
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Reiko Sudo (above) is known for her unusual designs, such as Paper Rolls
(below), created through a process called chemical lacework.
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Strips of nylon tape are embroidered onto a water-soluble fabric that is
then soaked, dissolving all but a trace of the threads.
Stuart Isett
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When designers Jun'ichi Arai and Reiko Sudo established the textile studio
and retail shop Nuno in 1984, using computers in fabric design was avant-garde.
Systems that could scan sketches by digital camera and create layouts on
computer screens had just been introduced. Now the technology is commonplace,
but the moment of revelation sticks in Sudo's mind. "I was 29, and
I had approached Arai as a handweaver," she says. "He told me
I could do my work by hand, but with a scanner--which at that time looked
like a big drum--I could transfer my designs to data and use industrial
production methods. I was shocked!"
Sudo recovered beautifully. When Arai left Nuno in 1987, Sudo became director
and chief creator. She has since steered the company to international prominence:
Nuno textiles are featured in the collections of more than a dozen major
museums, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Victoria &
Albert, and its affordable products are sold through distributors in Australia,
Switzerland, and England; and high-end department stores in Japan. Nuno
has also just opened a San Diego office to distribute their products in
North America, and they are planning to open a United States retail outlet
in the near future. I met with Sudo in the Nuno retail space on the sublevel
of the Axis Building in Tokyo's Roppongi--an unlikely place, I had assumed,
for a Japanese textile company. Traditionally Japanese textiles use plant
matter like indigo for dying and flax and cotton for weaving, so I
presumed that this upmarket location was only a sales outlet from which
to nab trendy consumers and that the real work must go on in the countryside.
Nuno is the simplest Japanese term for fabric. It's almost meaningless
in its lack of pretension. But Nuno is very much a Tokyo institution. Although
it has a warehouse about three hours outside the city and a network of craftsmen
scattered throughout the mountains and valleys of Japan, Nuno also has tight
connections with plastics and polyester manufacturers and industrial materials
researchers.
Its fabrics are a reflection of the Japanese urban environment,
which since the end of World War II has developed into a heady amalgamation
of futuristic efforts in science and technology and ancient rural sensibilities
that are intractable. Nuno's real work, the conceiving of incredible combinations
of methods and materials from past, present, and the near future, is carried
out by Sudo, 48, and her staff of 12, in the middle of Tokyo.
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Nuno's modest space (above) in Tokyo's Axis Building is both a
storefront and a design studio. In addition to clothing and accessories,
the store sells textiles such as the ones below.
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Coils
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Slipstream
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Vertigo
Top, courtesy Nuno. Others, Stuart Isett.
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Nuno melds the traditional materials, weaves, and dyes of Japanese craft
culture--including silk, cotton, handmade paper, salt-shrinking, mud-dyeing,
and sashiko cross-stitching--with those of the modern age: newspaper,
polyesters, nylon tape, telephone wire, silicone, grafitti, chemical
etching, rust-dyeing, heat-shrinking, caustic burning, and fatiguing by
hand, machine, and chemicals. Try to describe a few of the studio's original
textiles--now numbering almost 1,500--and you might get something like this:
traditional handmade washi (Japanese paper) attached to a velvet
base with synthetic glue; Okinawan banana fiber-coated cottons
chemically reprocessed; yarn made of stainless-steel wire woven with cotton
in a 60:40 ratio. It sounds as if the results, what some call "techno-textiles,"
might have some shock value or importance as conceptual art but would hardly
be beautiful.
And yet they are. One of Nuno's most recent shows in the United States was
last spring at the Atlanta International Museum of Art and Design. "The
first reaction is, 'look at that color,' or 'look at that pattern,'"
says Sara Riney, public relations manager for the museum. "Then you
start really looking at it, thinking, 'How did they get these feathers in
here?' or 'That piece of fabric reminds me of a boa constrictor.' It's very
deep and multitextured." Curators love it, but the true beauty of a
Nuno piece is in its easy application to life.
Many of the regional specialties of traditional Japanese textiles, like
shibori tying, and the cultivation and processing of indigo, banana
fiber, and ramie, are or have been close to dying out at one time or
another. Unlike creators of the previous generation, Sudo admits no nostalgia
for these traditions. Equally valuable to her are the latest scientific
and technological breakthroughs, like splatter painting used for automobiles
or a new material developed for biodegradable fishing nets (she has
buried some fabric made of that in her back garden to see if it will really
decompose). She gets a lot of her ideas for new techniques from tiny articles
on industry developments hidden away in a corner of the Nikkei Shimbun,
Japan's economic daily. Sudo cold calls development scientists and engineers
with whom she then works just to bring regular people another "functional
textile," which is how she defines all of Nuno's work. MoMA has
24 pieces by Nuno in its collection. "Design, differently from art,
is meant to be used," curator Paola Antonelli says. "We look for
the sublime in functional objects, but their functionality is part of that
sublime nature."
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