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.”
As a teenager, she dreamed of becoming an artist, hand-painting and resist-dyeing kimonos. Instead, she enrolled in a program for industrial, interior, and craft design at Tokyo’s Musashino Art University, graduating in 1975.
A few years later, she met Jun’ichi Arai, the wildly inventive textile designer, who collaborated with fashion designers like Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo. They founded Nuno together in 1984, but Arai, who was a generation older than Sudō and beset with financial difficulties, abandoned the company after just three years.
“My mission at Nuno had been to help Jun’ichi Arai and to promote his work,” Sudō says. “And then all of a sudden he left, and there I was, and there was the staff.
Somebody had to run it. So I pushed myself in a new direction.”
Right around then, two young curators from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Matilda McQuaid and Cara McCarty, began asking Sudō for help in researching Japanese fabric-making traditions. Their decade-long efforts culminated in the landmark 1998 MoMA survey “Structure and Surface: Contemporary Japanese Textiles.” The trips Sudō took with them, playing tour guide across remote regions of Japan, introduced her to many of the weavers and dyers, often working in small wooden ateliers attached to family homes, with whom Nuno still collaborates today.
“It’s very charming to watch her interacting with these artisans, many of whom are in their 80s,” says Sharon Takeda, who organized Sudō’s current retrospective at LACMA. “It’s very personal.
If they are struggling, she gives them ideas, and they work together, side by side.” Sudō also sometimes shares ideas with her husband, the architect Kazuyoshi Sudō. The couple live in the quiet, residential neighborhood of Shinjuku City, Tokyo, and have one adult son.
For years, Sudō was reluctant to take credit for her own designs. A catalyzing moment in her career came when Kunihiko Moriguchi, whose mastery of the dyeing technique for kimonos has made him a Japanese Living National Treasure, persuaded her to create a solo exhibition of her work at the Kyoto Art Center in 2001.
“I made two tearooms from fabric,” Sudō explains. “One was a rust-dyed fabric, because rust is ancient and representative of the Iron Age.
And the other was a cutting-edge fabric made from biodegradable plastics derived from corn.” The exhibition brought her international attention.
The LACMA show will reproduce the footprint of the original 1984 Nuno shop in Tokyo, a gathering place for artists, architects, and designers, but also literary translators, and anyone who appreciates fine fabrics. (“To weave textiles is to weave relationships,” Sudō writes in the catalog.) Bolts of fabric will line the walls, and scarves and other goods will be available for visitors to handle—and purchase!
The full textile experience, after all, is multisensory—visual, tactile, and sometimes auditory (think of taffeta’s distinctive rustle). Sudō’s preparatory drawings and tools will offer insight into her processes.
A series of bold, colorful kimonos, designed by Nuno and woven in collaboration with artisans from Isesaki—a Japanese city whose silk has been celebrated since the Edo period for its interlocking ikat patterns—promises to be among the exhibition’s highlights.
For Takeda, Sudō’s retrospective arrives at a moment when the dialogue between fiber art and contemporary art feels particularly rich. “Quilt making, embroidery, and knitting are coming back, and people are seeing how textiles have influenced artists in other realms,” she says, citing the 2018–2019 Anni Albers exhibition at Tate Modern and the 2025 “Woven Histories” show at MoMA.
Yet her work’s status as art remains complicated for Sudō. “I want to make textiles that move people, emotionally,” she explains.
“But fundamentally, I really want my fabrics to be used.”