Blending technology and ancient arts, the 72-year-old “dream weaver” continues to push textile design into unexplored realms.

By Paul Makovsky and Mary Murphy

Jun-ichi Arai isn’t a household name in the United States, but his work and reputation have made him a designer’s designer. For more than 40 years Arai has been rethinking what a fabric is: making three-dimensional scarves out of steel, reinterpreting ancient traditions like tie-dye, and developing flame-retardant fibers for theatrical and commercial drapery. His collaborations with Issey Miyake and Comme des Gareons in the 1970s and ’80s—when he became known for combining the new technologies of the West with the ancient Japanese art of obi fabric weaving—have had a huge influence on interior, fashion, and textile designers. “His primary legacy is this belief in experimentation, which is embodied in all of his work, whether it is destroying surfaces to create something that is much more beautiful than the original textile or using traditional methods with new materials,” says Matilda McQuaid, exhibitions curator and head of textiles at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

In an exclusive interview for Metropolis, senior editor Paul Makovsky and Mary Murphy, vice president of design at Maharam, spoke to Arai at Gallery Gen, a new venue for Asian contemporary and traditional art in New York, which mounted a mini-retrospective of the designer’s work earlier this year.

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Metropolis: You’ve said your work is about imagination rather than inspiration.
Jun-ichi Arai: There are expressions that have been used to describe me—one is “dream weaver.” But a dream is not something spontaneous, not something that can be quickly achieved. You have to keep seeing that dream, and you have to keep at it for a long time. And you need to have some consciousness of that dream; it’s not just an unconscious thing. If you make a conscious effort, sometimes it comes to you. I set things up, and I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I keep seeing the dream of how I want things to happen—it comes to me.

M: At one time you said that color was a luxury; now you use color exuberantly.
JA: When I was dealing with black and white, and shades of white, a friend said that he wanted to be able to paint light. I’m not so interested in colors that don’t have to do with light. I like pure silver, the way it shines. I also use aluminum and combine it sometimes with something called PPS (polyphenylene sulphide). It’s a polymer, and it’s not flammable. It’s not possible—at least it is very difficult—to dye it. Another textile I use is nylon film with oxidized titanium in the middle. It’s very black, but if you remove the film it becomes white. With nylon and oxidized titanium and aluminum you get entirely different kinds of blacks. It might sound strange, but I’m interested in dyeing light. If I were to dye regular fabric, it wouldn’t be so interesting. It just wouldn’t have this impact in terms of color. And I think there will come a time when everyone dyes things in this way.

M: You’re famous for the materials you use.
JA: I have a book on future materials—as opposed to new materials: “Expected Materials for the Future” is the way it translates. What really fascinates me the most is slit yarn and its thinness. We make it from a film that’s a fraction of a millimeter thick, somewhere between twenty and thirty microns. You slit the film into threads, and where you cut it, it’s just eight microns thick. In between the film I put silver or aluminum, and in the future it may be possible to have organic things in between—or even digital information. It’s a fascinating thing, all this information that you can put into one thread. Right now we use a blade to cut the surface, but if we were to spend millions of dollars, I think it would be possible to cut it with lasers. And when that becomes possible, we will be able to have a limitless amount of information in that thread. And not only does it contain information, but when you’re doing a double weave and then you give it a bit of an angle while you’re weaving it, it’s possible for the fabric to breathe—so it becomes wearable.

M: You mentioned PPS. How do you see it being used?
JA: I’ve been getting requests from the United States for at least the last twenty years for a material that can be used for art-related things, such as stage curtains, a material that shines, that has this characteristic. So when you put a light on the stage—whether you’re shining it on the fabric or lighting it from behind—and use various color gels, it would have very interesting effects. But what if it catches fire? If you would put a match to another fabric, it would burn up. This one doesn’t do that. The part that burns is the polyester, the edge piece. The rest of it doesn’t. And it doesn’t emit toxins.

M: What’s your opinion of textile education today?
JA: It’s not going in the right direction. The problem is that people think you can study it at school. You have to be on the shop floor. I think schools will become sort of industrial plants in themselves. I’m most interested in what’s going on in China. I’ve been invited there to give a seminar I call “Silk to Steel.” They’re trying to create a studio where they would actually make things. What’s happened as a result of intensive industrialization is that you mass-produce. But that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is making a small amount of things, and being able to make a great variety of them in a limitless way. Like one’s own fingerprints. Each individual has a different fingerprint. I think that’s the kind of variety that I’m looking for. But it’s not something that you can do yourself. You need the collaboration of hundreds of thousands of people to be able to produce that kind of thing.