Sabahs are made entirely by hand from 100% leather in either Texas or Turkey—two regions with distinct yet deeply rooted relationships to the material. The result is a shoe that varies subtly from pair to pair, even within the same size.
Takanaka, who sold out the 3,000-capacity Masonic with resale tickets going for upwards of $300, is one of the best examples of a renewed interest in the sounds of 1970s and '80s soft rock from Japan known as city pop.
The Olympus Perspective Playground operates as a fully built system, where walls, lighting rigs, circulation paths, and signage are developed together with each installation, creating a continuous spatial script.
TeamLab Planets quickly made a name for itself after opening its doors in 2018. It holds the Guinness World Record for the most-visited museum dedicated to a single group or artist, bringing in more than 2.5 million visitors from April 2023 to March 2024.
The curators of Greater New York really captured the energy of the city well - not the out-of-towner's New York with its glossy surfaces, brands, and trendy fare, but the gritty New York that's always in the process of formation, that rejects surface in favor of rawness.
Much of Instagram's video content is organized around transformation-the virtual magic of the before-and-after and clips that show cause and effect. A person makes pasta from scratch in 20 seconds via edits that compress time-intensive labor.
Kobe is a city where the sea and mountains are close together, with its urban area spreading across the slopes at the base of the mountains. In the Sannomiya area, the current city center, the most important urban axis connecting the sea to the mountains is Flower Road, running north-south from Shin-Kobe Station to the port.
Haruka Kojin (artist), Kenji Minamigawa (director), and Hirofumi Masui (production manager) are the founding trio of 目[mé] (which means "eye" in Japanese). Their approach? "To create works that allow us to relive the 'world as it is' that constantly unfolds before our eyes," they explain on their website. This rather mysterious intention has nonetheless led the Japanese collective, created in 2013, to exhibit at the Japan Society in New York and the Centre Pompidou-Metz, which have presented several of their installations. Japanese private homes seem to be a favorite disruptive space for the artists, who have previously integrated an extremely minimalist art gallery into a dilapidated house on another Japanese island in 2020. Other notable works include giant inflatable faces installed above natural landscapes and the recreation of monumental waves.
SO KOIZUMI DESIGN has developed Resonique, a ladder that explores the relationship between functional structure and sculptural form. The project draws on the structural logic of ladders while referencing the flowing geometries associated with brass musical instruments. Through this combination, the object shifts from a purely utilitarian tool toward a design piece that engages both function and spatial presence.
He takes materials others might overlook or discard from cardboard tubes to beer crates, styrofoam to shipping containers and subjects them to a kind of alchemy, refining rough edges and transforming fragility into sturdiness. The outcome is a perpetually ingenious and curiously poetic scavenger architecture that finds beauty and purpose in the everyday. From high-end boutiques to housing for refugees, Ban's buildings blur the lines between eastern and western design traditions, between the luxurious and the ordinary.
Naoto Nakagawa's current show at KAPOW brings together a significant group of new acrylic paintings and intimate watercolors, situating his recent practice within both the Japanese shunga tradition of erotic art and his own six-decade exploration of perception, material culture, and the natural world. On view at KAPOW in Manhattan's Lower East Side through February 22, works across the exhibition resonate with themes that have defined Nakagawa's career since the 1960s - most notably his persistent pairing of man-made objects with organic life.
Known most for her large-scale artworks created from vast, intricate networks of thread, she developed her unique practice to make tangible the endless speculative configurations of human connections - something to be experienced rather than defined. But by asking her to describe her new exhibition, Threads of Life at the Hayward Gallery, I'm dragging her back into a reductive world of language. "If I wanted to express myself in words, if I could explain in words, I'd rather write," she says. "So I want to build visually, and I want to create visually. What I want to describe is beyond words."