A New Generation of Paper Lantern-Makers Inspired by Noguchi

A New Generation of Paper Lantern–Makers Inspired by Noguchi A look at four design studios experimenting with paper and light. Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: The Noguchi Museum Archives, AndreaClaireStudio, Andrew Bui, Courtesy the subjects Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: The Noguchi Museum Archives, AndreaClaireStudio, Andrew Bui, Courtesy the subjects On Park Avenue in midtown, an office worker commuting home might pause to take in the Lever House lobby, which glows with more than a dozen hanging paper lanterns, or Akari, the name Isamu Noguchi gave to his delicate sculptures of washi paper and bamboo. That installation, along with a number of other Noguchi sculptures and models placed throughout the building, is not just your standard office art; it’s also a reminder of the connection between Gordon Bunshaft, the architect of the glassy office tower, and Noguchi, whom he commissioned in the early 1950s to design sculptures for the courtyard. Noguchi would never fulfill that commission, but he would, around this time, develop the lights that would become nearly ubiquitous. In 1951, the mayor of Gifu, Japan, tapped him to help revive the region’s centuries-old paper-lantern industry. Noguchi learned the traditional techniques from Ozeki & Co., Ltd., a family-owned company that still produces his designs today. His Akari series, which would total more than 200 models in all, stripped the lanterns of any writing and most of their color, stood them on thin metal stands, and replaced the oil lamps and candles that illuminated them with electric bulbs. The result was spare, geometric, and weightless. To honor the 75 years since their inception, the Noguchi Museum recently opened the exhibition “No Ordinary Light: Akari at 75,” which will run until September 5, 2027. Photo: Louise Dahl Wolfe/The Noguchi Museum Archives It would be easy to dismiss the Akari lamps as a commercial product compared to the rest of Noguchi’s output. The artist, who preferred not to be known as a designer, had by the late 1940s established a prolific practice in sculpture, furniture design, set design, and public works. But the Akari would number among his more accessible, lasting legacies, one he insisted on presenting even on the most prestigious stages. In 1986, only two years before his death, Noguchi became the first American artist with a solo presentation at the Venice Biennale. To much pushback, he displayed Akari in two of the pavilion’s rooms, a move that some say cost him the Golden Lion. The Akari from Noguchi’s Venice Biennale show. Photo: The Noguchi Museum Archives/B)2025 My Organization The title of that show, “What Is Sculpture?,” is yet another demonstration of his refusal to separate art from industrial design. The mammoth Akari he created for Venice, his biggest ever, is one of the highlights of the museum show and presented in its own pine structure, also designed for the Biennale. Revisiting Noguchi’s Akari also presents an opportunity to talk with a new generation of designers working with paper and light and their relationship to the artist. Below are four studios rethinking the paper lantern. Now based in Los Angeles, Andrea Claire first established her design practice in Brooklyn in 2011. Back in those days, Claire says the Noguchi Museum was her “happy place.” On one visit to the museum 15 years ago, she sought ideas for her first chandelier: “I knew what I wanted to do but didn’t yet understand how to do it.” Claire saw a video of how the Akari lights were made, and “it clicked,” she says. That same process is now essential viewing: “To this day, when someone starts working for me, I have them sit down and watch the same video as an introduction to my initial inspiration.” She turned to working with paper, specifically hanji, a traditional Korean paper, in 2020, after years of making pieces out of bamboo, glass, and porcelain. “The fact that it was used for over a thousand years in bookmaking spoke to its longevity, which is important in my work,” she says. This year, Claire looked to the work of Andy Goldsworthy and Constantin Brancusi for her latest collection, “Totemic,” which features vertical pendants that are a departure from her earlier, Calder-like mobile chandeliers. Three handcrafted shapes, Moon, Sage, and August, are interspersed on a brass stem between shiny, diamondlike beads. As a painter, Claire aims to show the imperfections of the textured and layered marblelike paper that gets wrapped by hand around brass armatures and conceals the lightbulb entirely. “The ability to see things in 3-D through computer programs is invaluable to my work,” she says. “But if the work weren’t made by hand in the end, it would lose its depth and the human touch.” Photo: Courtesy Andrea Claire Studio Photo: Courtesy Andrea Claire Studio Photo: Courtesy Andrea Claire Studio Photo: Courtesy of Kawabi Aaron and Irisa Chan-Kawabi, the duo behind New York-based studio Kawabi, met at the Parsons School of Design, where they studied product design “as a compromise.” It was a way to keep working creatively while satisfying pressure from their families to take a “practical career path.” Paper lanterns always had their attention. “Like us, they were migrants from another place, another origin,” Irisa says. And Noguchi was a particular inspiration as well, for the way he went about “finding ways to belong in his split identity between Japan and America.” Their practice began when they experimented with making objects for their own home, and came up with paper structure techniques that resembled traditional methods. Since then, they’ve studied with a paper maker and wood craftsmen in Japan to hone their craft. Their practice has evolved into a focus on making furniture-object hybrids they call “archival forms”—an interplay between traditional architecture, lighting, and historic archetypes. Yet they continue to use the traditional Japanese method Noguchi used, of coiling reed over a collapsible wooden mold for layering the paper on top. Photo: Courtesy of Kawabi In 2025, the Tea Screen Lamp from their Confluence collection is a triptych screen that looks like a hybrid between lighting and a room divider, with mulberry bark paper lamps encased into walnut burl panels. The Relic I Lamp, from the same collection, juxtaposes the lightness of a pleated paper fan with the sturdiness of the concrete block that holds it in place. At Assembly Line earlier this year, Kawabi launched their Amica collection, which gets its name from a collaboration with ceramics artist Christopher Merchant. The sconces, pendants, and table lamps blend two crafting techniques: hand-build ceramic and mulberry paper shades held open by white oak rims. “Looking back I think we weren’t designing with each other but for each other,” says Aaron of working with Merchant. Merchant’s bases emulate the wooden molds that Aaron and Irisa use to hold the paper in place as they structure the shades. In the Amica collection, the shape of the shades took a more symmetrical and traditionally Western approach. The Tea Screen lamp.The Relic I Lamp.Courtesy of Kawabi. The Tea Screen lamp.The Relic I Lamp.Courtesy of Kawabi. The Amica collection by Kawabi Photo: Ben Dehaan “I’ve had designers say my work is art because I am making it myself, while I’ve had artists say my work is clearly design because it is (somewhat) repeatable,” says Steffany Trần, who releases her work under Vy Voi, the name of her design and craft practice. The New York-based designer, originally from the Bay Area, began incorporating paper volumes into her ceramic works in 2024. She uses Dó paper sourced from family workshops in Northern Vietnam, where it’s been produced for over 800 years. A craftsman in Hoi An taught her how to make traditional Vietnamese lanterns with silk panels and bamboo frames over FaceTime, and then she proposed creating elliptical shades with the same techniques. “He told me it couldn’t be done. So, I did my own trial and error with Dó paper, testing dozens of glue combinations, hand pressure, and frame builds, learning how the paper behaves with every prototype made.” Her belief in honest materials, she feels, resonates with Noguchi’s philosophy. “There’s a clear respect in the natural state of what [Noguchi] chose to use, and I aim to echo that in my own work too.” Her designs draw from familiar, everyday items, like root vegetables. In the Rễ Cây collection, ovoid paper lamp shades inspired by different fruits and vegetables “sprout” from porcelain bases. Or they borrow from very particular Vietnamese references: Kite In-Flight refers to a whistling paper kite unique to Vietnam. Most recently, she’s developed a series of sconces that take their form from a particular way of wrapping bánh giò, a pyramid-shaped rice dumpling, in banana leaves. Tran considers industrial design to be the “polar opposite” of what she does, and plans to continue crafting her designs by hand. As she explains, “Whether it is bending lampshade frames with wood or brushing on lacquer, there are tell-tale signs that a human made it that is incredibly grounding during an age of extreme waste and mass production.” Designer Thomas Yang doesn’t believe in “treating material as a means to an end,” the mentality he associates with industrial design. He far prefers the rituals associated with craft, even when it involves unearthing heavy stones from riverbeds upstate. Since completing his residency at Colony in 2024—where he debuted an entire home collection, including paper lanterns rooted in his Taiwanese heritage—Yang continues to explore new applications for materials like stone, wood, and paper. “It was Noguchi who led me to paper,” Yang says. “In university, I studied the Akari manufacturing method through video archives and books.” Yang’s 2024 Tian Den series of lamps is composed of two sheets of Yame Kozo Hadaura paper, a regional variation on mulberry bark paper made in Yame, Fukuoka Prefecture, seamed together with bamboo ribbing. Suspended on a wooden frame, the shade “dances” with the slightest breeze. In a more recent iteration, Yang designed a similar paper shade finished in beeswax to be placed atop a wooden sconce. “Laminating it with beeswax binds the paper and makes it naturally hydrophobic, adding both robustness and longevity, as wax is a preservative,” Yang says. From left: Photo: Courtesy Thomas YangPhoto: Courtesy Thomas Yang From top: Photo: Courtesy Thomas YangPhoto: Courtesy Thomas Yang For this year’s Stone series, Yang uses an architectural method known as ishibadate where wooden columns stand directly atop foundation stones without anchors. The lamp base is a wood stem dovetailed to the face of a river stone using both machine and hand. Three layers of paper in varying finishes sit on top diffusing the light, while the wire and frame are exposed, “hinting at the intentions beneath,” as Yang explains. The stem is removable for portability, reminiscent of the flat-packed capability of Akari. “The more I developed the practice, the more I hoped for the work to be completely ordinary, like a seasoned cooking spoon passed down through generations,” Yang says. “I hope that an object can speak beyond its form to what has come before, and to how it may shape the conversation going forward.” From left: Rock table lamp, by Thomas Yang Studio. Photo: Courtesy Thomas YangRock floor lamp. Photo: Courtesy Thomas Yang From top: Rock table lamp, by Thomas Yang Studio. Photo: Courtesy Thomas YangRock floor lamp. Photo: Courtesy Thomas Yang A New Generation of Paper Lantern–Makers Inspired by Noguchi Your product is saved! You’ll receive emails when your saved products go on sale. Manage preferences.