“Into the Space” turns a single suspended object into a vast Japanese landscape

A single presence hangs above the stage in Shibuya, Tokyo, and the room reorganises itself around it. Into the Space, by Nakamura Kazunobu Design-works, is an installation conceived as both scenography and spatial experiment: Japanese dance performances unfold beneath the object, and audiences are invited onto the stage before and after the show to inhabit the work at close range.

The concept is rooted in a distinctly Japanese way of “making place” without building enclosure. The studio points to Sakuteiki, the Heian period text on garden making, where space begins with the act of placing a stone. It also recalls Ikenobo Sen’o’s proposition that a small arrangement, flowers and a trace of water, can conjure the vastness of mountains and rivers.

Into the Space translates that principle into a contemporary interior: one object, placed in emptiness, evokes a landscape that is not physically there, yet becomes palpable through the atmosphere it generates around it. If the earlier Fragrance with Lotus Flowers explored fog as a field of lines, Into the Space looks upward, to the sky. Japan’s humid climate produces an ever shifting archive of cloud forms, a subject threaded through poetry and painting. Here, Nakamura fixates on the swirling voids that sometimes open inside moving cloud banks, then rebuilds that phenomenon as a single organic form.

The object is made from hundreds of thin planes, tilted to catch light and cast layered shadows. As these shadows accumulate, darker pockets appear, suggesting mass and depth, so the cloud reads less as an object and more as a volume. Visitors are invited into the blankness around it, then compelled to look up and “face” the work as a singular being.

Each plane is drawn and positioned in 3D space, then tuned through computational design to achieve both structural balance and visual irregularity. The suspension system is equally precise: ten steel mesh grid panels, each 800 by 1600 millimetres, are fixed to the ceiling, with fine threads dropping along the grid to support each 3 millimetre thick board at three points.

Material choices keep the effect light while staying robust. The planes are cut from reinforced corrugated archival board made from 100 percent virgin pulp, the same class of material used for durable art storage. Fine polyethylene fibre thread completes the illusion, making the cloud appear to hover rather than hang.

Into the Space is designed to be deployed in different venues, generating new scenery depending on the proportions, lighting conditions, and the void that surrounds it. Having already appeared in multiple locations, with further sites proposed, the project argues for a transferable design method: create place by placing one form, then let the surrounding emptiness become the true room.

Project Credit

Project Name: Into the Space
Location: Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, JAPAN
Installation Design: NAKAMURA KAZUNOBU DESIGN-WORKS / Kazunobu Nakamura
Lighting-design: Theaterbrain / Masao Igarashi
Photograph: Masaki Komatsu
Material: Reinforced corrugated board (3 mm thick, 540 x 720 mm) made from 100% virgin pulp

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