Craft x Tech at the V&A: When a Craft Changes Scale

Six pairs of makers have brought the techniques of Japan's Tokai region to a gallery at the V&A in London. Each collaboration asks which qualities survive when a technique leaves the object it was developed to make.

The project joins workshops in Gifu, Aichi and Mie with six international designers. Its founder, Hideki Yoshimoto, has assembled a group that reaches beyond a single design capital. Among the participants are Atang Tshikare from South Africa, Australian designer David Caon and the Italian-Singaporean studio Lanzavecchia + Wai. The display remains in Room 64b until 30 September.

Paper becomes a room

The clearest transformation may be Grid Unwoven. Washi maker Takanori Senda and Lanzavecchia + Wai have made a self-standing screen in Mino paper. During production, water and gravity allow the fibres to gather unevenly, leaving a surface denser towards the top and more open below. A programmed light behind the screen makes the paper's thickness legible across time.

Its achievement lies in controlling a large vertical sheet while allowing the fibre to remain visibly irregular. The familiar geometry of a shoji persists, while paper becomes the spatial event.

Shibori carries the light

Kataginu, made by Bethan Laura Wood with Hiroyuki Murase of Suzusan, moves Arimatsu-Narumi shibori from clothing into lighting. The work takes its name and shape from a Japanese sleeveless garment with pronounced shoulders. Tying, stitching, folding and dyeing give its fabric depth that changes with the lamp's light. The retained marks of making let the viewer read how the cloth was manipulated.

Murase is the fifth-generation successor to a family involved in this Aichi dyeing tradition. Here, continuity is visible in the precision of the technique; change arrives through scale, colour and the decision to turn the textile into a luminous object.

A braid becomes architecture

Tshikare's Yamollo, made with Iga kumihimo artisan Tomoyuki Matsuda, gives braided cord a sculptural and architectural task. Earth-coloured threads descend around a lit form; a related shield works as a divider. At this scale the gradation of the braid reads from a distance, while exposed threads near the base return attention to the hand.

Hard surfaces retain uncertainty

The other collaborations extend the inquiry into ceramics and metal. David Caon's Fushi assembles precisely made Mino ceramic modules into a console and lamp; Oribe glaze makes their surfaces vary after firing. Philippe Malouin's Kasane stacks Owari Shippo enamelled copper boxes whose restrained geometry allows the silver-wire technique to carry the detail.

Eugene Kangawa and kiln head Mayuki Kato combine Seto sometsuke porcelain tiles, painted in indigo, with wooden joinery in chairs made at adult and child scale, accompanied by tea vessels. Each object preserves a material intelligence: a glaze's unpredictability, enamel's exacting line, or the variation of a painted blue brushstroke.

The commercial question

The project's catalogue describes the works as limited editions of six, with two artist's proofs. A workshop's future may depend on finding commissions beyond its traditional product. The display demonstrates technical adaptability, though it does not establish whether limited-edition design alone can sustain the regional makers who supplied that skill.

The question therefore continues outside the museum: whether a new audience also creates durable work, transmission and bargaining power for the workshops. Craft changes scale successfully when the new object retains the maker's intelligence and the new market recognises its value.

Visit: Craft x Tech Tokai Project, V&A South Kensington, Medieval & Renaissance galleries, Room 64b. On view until 30 September 2026. Official exhibition information.