Created for the Craft x Tech Tokai Project, Grid Unwoven begins with the most elemental of orders: the grid. A rigid orthogonal frame of wood, regular and predictable, that gradually loosens its own logic. As the eye travels across the screen, the straight battens bend into curves, the squares swell into arcs, and the structure appears to come undone as if the weave that holds it together were quietly unravelling. At its core, a LED column washes the paper with slowly shifting colour, animating the whole surface from within. What starts as architecture ends as movement and light.
At the heart of the piece is Mino Washi, one of Japan’s most revered handmade papers, crafted from kozo fibre, water, and patience in a tradition over 1,300 years old. Working in the Gifu workshop of master papermaker Takanori Senda, we came to know washi not as a surface but as a living thing: fibrous, breathing, holding light within itself. Stretched across the wooden grid, the paper glows: every cloud of fibre, every variation in density becomes visible, turning the screen into a membrane between solidity and air.
The wooden lattice is at once frame and drawing. Where the grid stays orthogonal it reads as discipline; where it curves it becomes gesture, the battens bending in continuous arcs that the craftsmen shaped by hand. The undulating crest of the screen and its wave-like footprint give the static object a sense of slow motion: a structure caught in the act of transforming.
Before the screen took shape, there was the journey to Gifu — to the riverside workshop of the Warabi Paper Company, where master papermaker Takanori Senda crafts Mino Washi by hand. Senda cultivates his own raw materials and has spent years pushing the thousand-year-old tradition beyond its conventional limits, working with hotels, designers and brands. Under his guidance we learned the gestures of washi at the source: pressing leaves into wet sheets, drawing translucent pulp across the screen, feeling how fibre, water and patience settle into a single surface. It was Senda’s mastery that made it possible to take the paper to an architectural scale, and his hands are present in every panel of the piece. The making of the paper became inseparable from the making of the work itself.
Grid Unwoven was created for the Craft x Tech Tokai Project, the second edition of Craft x Tech an initiative founded by designer Hideki Yoshimoto (Tangent) and led by Maria Cristina Didero as Curatorial Director, bridging Japanese traditional crafts with contemporary design.
For this edition, six internationally acclaimed creators were each paired with a master artisan from the Tokai region: we were paired with Takanori Senda of the Warabi Paper Company to work with Mino Washi, the handmade paper of Gifu Prefecture, inscribed as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage.
The other collaborating creators are David Caon (Mino Yaki), Bethan Laura Wood (Arimatsu Narumi Shibori), Philippe Malouin (Owari Shippo), Eugene Kangawa / EUGENE STUDIO (Seto Sometsuke Yaki) and Atang Tshikare (Iga Kumihimo) Craft x Tech is organised by Tangent Japan Ltd. The completed works were unveiled at kudan house, Tokyo, in June 2026.
Installed at kudan house in Tokyo, the screen finds a natural dialogue with the traditional Japanese interior — its tatami, its shōji, its wooden joinery. The internal LED column casts a slowly shifting light that drifts through changing colours, turning Grid Unwoven into a living lantern at the centre of the room: its grid echoing the architecture around it while the curves drift free of the rectilinear order that surrounds them.
