TAI Modern

Opening at TAI Modern this month is NAKATOMI HAJIME, the artist's first solo exhibition in the US. The exhibition brings together work from five series developed over more than two decades — Prism, Musubi, Auspicious 8, Frill, and FLY — work defined by a single animating question: what does it mean for something not to look like bamboo?

Rather than emphasizing material qualities or classical techniques and forms, Nakatomi embraces this paradoxical inquiry. His aim is to express the beauty of bamboo through colors, shapes, sizes, and materials not typically found in bamboo art. The most recent works in the exhibition combine bamboo with other materials, such as gold.

NAKATOMI HAJIME
June 26 – July 25, 2026

OPENING RECEPTION
Friday, June 26, 5 – 7PM

ARTIST TALK
Saturday, June 27, 2PM

📷 Nakatomi Hajime "FLY: stardust" 2023, madake bamboo, rattan, gold leaf, 17 x 17.5 x 15.5 in. Image: Minamoto Tadayuki

Beginning with a single bamboo culm selected from the forest, Fujinuma Noboru carves the material to accentuate its natural form, then applies more than one hundred layers of colored "urushi" lacquer, sanding back through the surface to reveal luminous strata of color beneath. After days of polishing, the result is a work of extraordinary surface complexity and compelling luster.

TAI Modern at Dallas Art Fair | April 16–19, 2026 | Fashion Industry Gallery, Booth C6

📷 Fujinuma Noboru “Lacquered Bamboo Cylinder (320)” 2020, moso bamboo, lacquer, 21 x 7 x 6.5 in

Japanese bamboo sculpture does not simply inherit tradition—it extends it.

Tradition is often imagined as a linear force: a set of inherited forms, rules, and timelines that promise continuity. Innovation, by contrast, arrives as a disruption – bending lines and rules, insisting on new ways of thinking and seeing. Fourth generation bamboo artist Tanabe Chikuunsai IV is a master at balancing these opposing forces. His new series, “Action Clay,” bends inherited techniques toward new conceptual terrain. In “Creation Through Collapse – Five Cosmic Elements,” he paints an organic woven bamboo form with colored earth and sprays of black and white paint.

At this year's EXPO Chicago, TAI Modern brings together a group of artists whose work spans the full expressive range of bamboo as a sculptural medium, from intimate works of precision and sensitivity to large-scale sculptural forms that test the material's expressive limits.

"Warping Timelines: Tradition to Innovation" TAI Modern at EXPO CHICAGO 2026 | April 9–12, 2026 Navy Pier Festival Hall, Booth 302

📷 Tanabe Chikuunsai IV "Creation Through Collapse – Five Cosmic Elements" 2025, tiger bamboo, earth, paint, 27.5 x 14.5 x 25.5 in. (Image credit: Tadayuki Minamoto)