"Into The Space" By Nakamura Kazunobu Design-Works
"Into the Space": An Installation Art Space That Attempts to Express Japanese Beauty recognized with Best of Year Awards 2023 Honoree (Installation Category) and Architecture MasterPrize 2023 Award (Exhibition Category).
The installation art space focused on expressions of Japanese beauty, was designed by Kazunobu Nakamura of Nakamura Kazunobu Design-Works for Egiku Japanese-Dance Products in Tokyo, Japan. Japanese dance performances were held at this location and, both before and after the performances, audiences were invited on stage to actually experience the installation.
Japan is an island nation tht experiences a great deal of humidity. Throughout the year, various clouds formations flow through the sky. In Japan, clouds have been an important element of scenery since ancient times, and have been written about in numerous poems. Fascinated by the beautiful, large, swirling holes that sometimes appear in those flowing clouds, the designer attempted to recreate them. Thin boards tilted in various directions catch the light and create shadows, and those shadows pile up irregularly to create darker shadows, indicating the volume of the clouds. It is a single organic form object and, around it, a blank space is created that invites people in. Visitors look up and face one being.
One by one, hundreds of thin boards are drawn in 3D space by the designer, and finely adjusted to a structurally balanced position by cutting-edge computational design to form a single object. Fixed to the ceiling are ten steel mesh grid panels, 800 mm wide by 1600 mm long, from which countless thin threads hang down regularly along the grid. Each thin board, 3 mm thick, is balanced in the air with three points pierced by its threads, and each board rests in the air in a defined shape. The thin boards are made of 100% virgin pulp material, which is also used in art storage boxes for strength and durability.
This object can be deployed in various spaces, creating different sceneries around it depending on where it is placed. It has already been exhibited in two locations, and two more locations are being proposed. This way of thinking about space creation can be applied to the design of any space.
This work is an attempt to express the Japanese aesthetic sense of finding beauty in a single component of nature, such as a single flower, and then creating a space using such an organically shaped object.
Project Info
Project Name: Into the Space
Location: Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, JAPAN
Client: EGIKU JAPANESE-DANCE PRODUCTS
Installation Design: NAKAMURA KAZUNOBU DESIGN-WORKS / Kazunobu Nakamura
Dancer: Egiku Hanayagi, Keijirou Wakayagi
Japanese Flute: Michiko Fukuhara
Sound Crew: Yasuo Kawata
Lighting Design: Theaterbrain / Masao Igarashi
Production: Tashibu to Fukushima
Stage Director: Noriyuki Shirato