nendo static bubbles – DesignApplause

nendo / static bubbles. Carpenters workshop gallery.

Jan 7, 2012

21 january > 3 march 2012 | paris | left: farming net vase 03 | click > enlarge

Bearable lightness and other thoughts on nendo on the occasion of ‘Static Bubbles’, Carpenters Workshop Gallery, Paris.

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This year, Tokyo-based design firm nendo is celebrating its tenth anniversary by doing what nendo does best: quietly but surely going about their work.

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This may not sound like a way to mark a successful decade, but the fruits of nendo’s labor were anything but ordinary. For nendo, simply ‘getting things done’ means a bevy of significant exhibitions this year and last, including a retrospective at flagship Tokyo design space Axis Gallery, museum acquisitions (the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago), new products for Milan, a major Canadian museum exhibition design and interiors in Japan, China, Italy and the UK. All of these are testing the firm’s distinctive sensibility in new areas, against new constraints.

In other words, nendo is doing something exciting, and the world is taking note. But would you know this from founder Sato Oki and team’s quiet demeanor, or from the deceptive simplicity of their work ? Perhaps not, but again, that is entirely the point. It is this combination of thoughtfulness and caprice, hidden within minimalism of form and an unusual attention to process and detail, that make nendo what they are, and that characterizes the new work shown here at Carpenters Workshop Gallery.

One keyword for understanding nendo’s work is ‘lightness’. Of the new work shown in this exhibition, the farming-net objects (2012) play with the visual perception of physicality. They claim space for their strange geometric forms but hover between perceptibility and imperceptibility, materiality and immateriality. Stronger than organdy but lighter and more flexible than wire mesh, the farming-net objects merge structure and form, object and shadow. They’re absolutely functional yet prefer to suggest in their three-dimensional clouds the space that a container or vase might occupy. [ nendo ] Photos courtesy of [ carpenters workshop gallery ]