I’m the first to admit that I know little to nothing about the Asian arts. So when I walked into the White Lotus Gallery in response to a press release with one strange word, “Nuno,” I truly didn’t know what to expect.
I walked into a gallery hung with fabulously beautiful fabrics that appeared to be worn as lightweight shawls. I started to peel the moment like an onion, one layer after another by reading, talking, looking and touching.
I was in the presence of Nuno, a design company out of Japan, brain child of a world-renowned textile designer Reiko Sudo. Why is that special? Because in Japan over hundreds of generations, families all over the country have specialized in different aspects of spinning, dying, and milling fabric.
These unique skills are dying out for all the usual post-modern reasons. The company called Nuno has reached out and given them work again but with a twist—now they are using state-of-the-art materials and high-tech manufacturing technologies.
But there’s more of this onion to peel. The designers themselves are coming up with fabrics the world hasn’t seen before. For example, one day Reiko and her team were sitting around a tea house talking and absently folding straws into origami. They got the idea to fold a cardboard into origami shape. They pressed a diaphanous high tech polyester against it and applied heat that made the folds permanent. They removed the cardboard and developed a fabric that opens up into a 3-D origami scarf as fine as spider silk. Dropped, it collapses into a silvery slippery ribbon like magic.
Another example is a Merino wool shawl with a delicate design called Watayuki, the Japanese idea of the first snow of winter. Now I see. A shawl with a poem—this is a very high, refined art of storytelling and imagination spoken through the language of textiles.
Now I see why this amazing show has taken pride of place at the White Lotus Gallery.
