The floor-to-ceiling windows of the new building for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art offer panoramic vistas of Downtown LA, but they posed a challenge for light-sensitive art. Enter Reiko Sudō, the visionary Japanese textile artist. Her solution: a vast yet seemingly weightless expanse of semitransparent curtains covered in a microscopic layer of chrome, which shimmer against the museum’s poured concrete walls while protecting the art and softening the city views.
Since May, the curtains at the Peter Zumthor–designed building—beautiful, transformative, and profoundly useful—have been providing museumgoers with an introduction to Sudō’s work. But a deeper look into her revolutionary practice arrives at LACMA this fall, when “Textile Alchemy: The Art of Reiko Sudō and Nuno” opens on September 20. Nuno (which means “cloth” in Japanese) is the name of the 10-person, Tokyo-based textile atelier that Sudō has headed for close to 40 years. Their basement shop in the Roppongi neighborhood is where the results of Sudō’s experiments, marrying centuries-old artisanal traditions with cutting-edge technologies, may be seen.
Sustainability—of materials but also of craftspeople and their specialized knowledge—has long been a focus of Sudō’s practice. Her works draw upon wellsprings of both textile history and technical innovation. In Feather Organza, for example, pockets of gossamer-thin, multilayered silk organza contain individual guinea fowl feathers, floating like the memory of softness. The design recalls an Akita prefecture tradition of weaving swan feathers into men’s kimono-style jackets. Silk crepes (or chirimen), once salt-shrunken in ocean water, are treated with gels or pastes and oven-baked or steam-finished, creating dimensional organzas recalling jellyfish or Bubble Wrap. Metals are incorporated into traditional weaves using techniques borrowed from the automotive industry; spandex comes to resemble origami. Don’t discard the past, her work suggests; use it to fashion a future of expanded possibilities and greater harmony with the natural world. “Everyone thinks she is obsessed with the past,” says her friend Gwenaël Nicolas, a French-born, Japan-based architect. “But in fact her mind is totally
in the future.”
“Contradiction is my life!” Sudō says, laughing, on a recent call. She specifies: “Running a business—which I was never meant to do—making textiles for Nuno and working with Japanese artisans, and, on the other hand, consulting for Muji on fabrics, clothing, furniture, and sustainability.” She has sat on the advisory board of the retailer since 2016 and to date has published four volumes of an ongoing survey of Japanese textiles with them.
Born in 1953 in Ishioka, a rural hamlet in Ibaraki prefecture about an hour north of Tokyo, Sudō grew up as the eldest of three children in “a really, really old-style family,” she says. Her father, a haiku poet, could trace their roots in the village back for 36 generations. They were landowners and the leading family in a tiny town where everyone was related and knew everybody’s business. “We were not poor, but in our minds we were not rich,” Sudō says. “Everything—dishes, furniture, houses—came from history.” The Japanese concept of mottainai—loosely translated as the sense of regret that accompanies waste—was drummed into her at an early age. “Never throw things away,” she explains. “Always take care with items, but also with relationships.”
