70-some years after Isamu Noguchi made his formative visit to Gifu, Japan – where he fell in love with, and ultimately riffed upon, the town’s mulberry bark paper and bamboo lanterns – it’s hard not to imagine him cringing post mortem at the flood of flimsy, dorm-room knockoffs that hit the market in the late 2010s. Akari, they were not.
Fortunately, the current paper lighting trend revival is treating the medium with a little more reverence. This new wave feels truer to the spirit of the original 16th-century forms (and a clear step up from first-apartment fare).
