A silkworm spins two threads at once. One is the fine, lustrous filament that becomes silk. The other, kibiso, is a coarse, waxy outer casing that gets stripped away and thrown into animal feed or bars of soap. For most of textile history, that was the end of its story. Then Reiko Sudō sent it to a mill in Tsuruoka and asked the workers there to spin it anyway. What came back was a thread with a character of its own, stiff where silk is usually soft, and it became one of the signature materials of NUNO, the textile collective Sudō has led out of Tokyo since 1984.
Reiko Sudō for NUNO in collaboration with Saitō Sangyō Co., Ltd., Nami osa (“Wavy Reed,” aka “Reed Ripple”), 1997, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Sue Tsao, © NUNO Corporation, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA, by Jonathan J. Urban.
That impulse to interrogate what most people discard or ignore sits at the centre of Textile Alchemy: The Art of Reiko Sudō & NUNO, opening at LACMA's Resnick Pavilion on September 20 and running until March 7, 2027. Over 100 textiles will fill the galleries, most pulled from the museum's own substantial NUNO holdings, alongside the drawings, prototypes and raw materials behind them. It is the fullest account yet assembled of a career that has spent four decades treating textile design as a form of chemistry.
Reiko Sudō for NUNO in collaboration with Yasuda Textile Co., Ltd., Kūchū rōkaku (“Castles in the Air”), 2026, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Bernard Kester Costume and Textiles Acquisition Fund, © NUNO Corporation, image courtesy NUNO Corporation, by Masayuki Hayashi
Sudō's Metal series is where that chemistry gets literal. She took the chrome sputtering used to coat plastic trim on car dashboards, a process built for hard plastic, and coaxed it onto fabric instead. The cloth that resulted looks like liquid metal but drapes like silk, and it is impossible to look at without wondering what else in a factory has been mistaken for waste. On Amami Ōshima, that same curiosity turned to handspun silk threads once resist-dyed in mud, unpicked from old cloth and rewoven into patterns that had never existed before.
Reiko Sudō, Nuno Corporation, SD Fabric Co., Ltd., Textile Length, 'San (Lath Screen)', 2004 (alternate view), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of Susana Mercedes Scroggins, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA
None of this reads as nostalgia. When Sudō spent the 1990s travelling to Japan's textile-producing regions, meeting artisans whose skills had few buyers left, she came back treating washi papermaking and hand embroidery as live materials rather than museum pieces. Stencil-dyed meisen ikat gets the same treatment in the show, pulled apart and reassembled rather than simply preserved.
Reiko Sudō, Nuno Corporation, Maruya Senkō Co., Ltd., Textile Length, 'Sōun (Stratus)' from 'Salt Shrink' Series, 1992, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of Grace Tsao, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA
Sudō was born in Ibaraki Prefecture in 1953 and trained in textile design at Musashino Art University, where she later worked as a research assistant. She has taught at Musashino and advised Muji, and her work now sits in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Met and the V&A. Her most public commission may be the one LACMA visitors walk past without knowing it: working with architect Peter Zumthor, she designed the chrome-sputtered curtains now hanging through the museum's new David Geffen Galleries, tuned to soften the California light rather than shut it out.
At the heart of the exhibition sits a full recreation of NUNO's original 1984 shop, rebuilt as a working store where visitors can leave with the same cloth they have just watched come apart on a factory line and reassemble into something worth wearing.
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Further Information:
Textile Alchemy: The Art of Reiko Sudō & NUNO, opens at LACMA's Resnick Pavilion on September 20 and runs until March 7, 2027.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Reiko Sudō, Hiroko Kobayashi, Mizue Okada, Nuno Corporation, Takekura Co., Ltd., Textile Length, 'Origami Pleats' from 'Origami' Series, 1997 (alternate view), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of Grace Tsao, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA.
All further images as credited in captions.