On: The Homage with Mira Nakashima & Thomas TK Zung
In celebration of “An Homage to Four Friends” on view in New York City, we welcomed the Nakashima Woodworkers Family to our studio for one special night during NYCxDESIGN’s 10th anniversary design week.
Moderated by our Principal, Tommy Zung, we took this opportunity to bring together our city’s design community around a panel with Mira Nakashima, Vaishu Ilankamban, and Thomas TK Zung. We opened our studio as they dived into the stories behind the ‘Homage’ discussing topics of friendship, craftsmanship, and timelessness of influence.
Vaishu Ilankamban, Mira Nakashima, Thomas TK Zung, Tommy Zung, and Spencer Bailey
Tommy Zung: “Mira, when father had written to you and said that he has this grand idea, he asked you to create something. What first went through your mind when he thought of the Homage?”
Mira Nakashima: “Well, when I was growing up, my dad knew all of those people that you mentioned. Harry Bertoia in particular was a very dear friend. He met Harry and Isamu in the early days in the 40s when he was working with Knoll Studios. With Harry Bertoia in particular, they had a lot in common in the way they approached materials and their sense of design, and their way of insisting that you make things by hand. They were really good friends so the Bertoia family and the Nakashima family often visited back and forth. Their children became my friends and we became friends while the parents were talking about stuff that I should’ve been listening to but I wasn’t.”
“Isamu had an almost exactly parallel life with my father. I didn’t really figure it out until after they were both gone. I did a show that had Akari and Nakashima Furniture in Washington DC after they both passed. They were born within a year of each other, they had parallel lives, but did not intersect often. They had affiliated studios on the same island in Japan, in Shikoku, towards the end of their lives and they died within a year of each other. They also had this conflict between being both East and West. They both have one foot in each culture and were trying to achieve a balance between the two. He never spoke very much to me about it, but I believe that there was this tension between the East and the West in both of their psyches which came out in what they created.”
Photograph of Isamu Noguchi, Buckminster Fuller and George George Nakashima (left to right)
“I don’t remember [how much we] associated with Buckminster Fuller but there is a picture with Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi and my father in Tokyo so they must’ve met there. I didn’t get to go on most of the trips to Japan until after my father died so I probably wasn’t there but my brother was there.”
Mira: “My assistant Vaishu who’s with us today. She is an engineer as well as a woodworker and a designer and she had just recently taken a workshop in coopering. Also, Celia Bertoia had harvested an Oak tree that lived by the Bertoia studio, and she had it milled into lumber and dried properly. She brought it down to us once and said “here, take this, make something out of it.” I couldn’t figure out what to make of it but we decided to make a base out of it. So Vaishu very diligently figured out how to do the angles. I drew this out and thought it would be nice to have the base one diameter and the top a different diameter and so it would be angled in between. Since Val’s piece formed a pentagon, the base should also be a pentagon. I didn’t realize how hard that was! It’s a whole different ball game.”
Vaishu Ilankamban: “I think in a way [the Homage] developed through conversation. I remember me and Jaysond went down to the Arts building where there’s another Bertoia piece. It sits on top of a hollow box and when we moved that piece, we realized the sound really resonated a lot more so that’s where the idea of creating something hollow came from. I think originally we actually had this set up as a ten-sided figure because we thought we didn’t have enough Bertoia wood to make it a five sided piece but later on it ended up being perfectly a pentagon.
It is the same process as making barrels which are coopered, the difference is that this is tapered in a little bit. Coopering has been done in woodworking for quite some time. These specific angles do have to be done with some trigonometry so it is something you have to check and double-check because there’s a little bit more angles going on. Also making sure that the machine can handle those angles with precision is the finesses of that.”
Tommy: And then you made the other piece (Table No.2), which is a standalone and extraordinary. I really loved being a part of the process [of selecting the wood for the piece] and to me I felt the lineage of it all. I was intimidated, nervous and looking at it with Sarah and the staff, I’m thinking ‘how large is this piece,’ bringing tape measures out, being an annoying architect. I finally said ok, hold on, they’re just kind of asking what it looks like and I thought about the time I read The Soul of a Tree and how passionate your father was about [the wood]. I asked myself, ‘what is it supposed to really do?’ I thought to myself, ‘that one has more character… this piece of the wood will show, that piece of the wood will show,’ and then surrendering to that was really nice. Then there was no more to think about than the craftsmanship and the work that you were doing.”
Tommy Zung and Thomas TK Zung
Thomas TK Zung: “The reason we are so passionate about all this is because the money from this auction is going to one thing and one thing only, peace. The foundation that Mira’s father founded years ago: The Peace Foundation.”
Mira: “My father founded it in 1984 to make the peace altar that is still in the Cathedral Saint John the Divine. We’ve made two more peace altars in hopes that we’ll make more for each continent of the world but in the meantime we are trying to maintain the Nakashima buildings to make sure the organization continues beyond our lifetime.”
Thomas: “What could be a better metaphor than peace by four, as known now, giants. But really friends. Friends first and then giants.”
Mira Nakashima speaking with an audience member
Nakashima Woodworkers Family at Studio Zung
Tommy Zung and Thomas TK Zung
Tommy: “What I think is important about the Homage, is that it gets passed down to the younger generations. That they understand the tactile nature of the creative process and how hands informs mind, mind informs hand, hand informs mind. Relationships are the centers for true creativeness. Creativeness comes through that synergy and also spontaneity between two people. It can’t be forced, it can’t be put there. It goes through conversations so I hope people see this and it forms people of lineage, it informs people about synergy, and about continuing to be in a relationship with one another, and that the American design community is important. Very important.”
Available for purchase as a collection or each piece individually. Proceeds to go to the Nakashima Foundation for Peace and the Buckminster Fuller Partners Foundation. Browse the Homage here.
Photo by Jonathan Hökklo
