Document Type

Book

Publication Date

2023

Abstract

Midnight. The Peak Lounge, Park Hyatt, Tokyo.

Fifty washi paper lanterns. An anonymous slow- tinkling piano. Smooth saki in a tiny glass.

Tokyo spreads out to left and right, in vast and awesome twinkling-throbbing glory. Somewhere out there, karaoke is in full swing, geisha listen to boasting businessmen, and grown-up schoolgirls play potent power games . . .

I stand right up to the glass and touch the city with my fingertips. It ripples and pulses under my touch.

Am I lost in translation?

I put on Reiko Sudo’s Otter Skin (1995) and dive off into this night . . .

Otter Skin. Glinting, waterlogged, damp and loaded. Dense black, crow black, almost scaly. Affective, unsettling, brooding. Reiko Sudo’s fabric holds its breath, merges into my skin and waits.

Can a textile, a piece of cloth, a woven substrate, be this potent?

Comments

This text in a chapter in Jessica Hemming's The Textile Reader, Bloomsbury, 2nd edition, 2023 (1st published in 2012). It was originally commission for Lesley Millar's 21:21 Reiko Sudo and NUNO publication in 2005.

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