TAI Modern | EXPO CHICAGO 2026

WARPING TIMELINES: TRADITION TO INNOVATION

Booth 302 | April 9 - 12, 2026

Navy Pier Festival Hall, Chicago, IL

Japanese bamboo sculpture does not simply inherit tradition. It extends it. The artists presented by TAI Modern at EXPO CHICAGO 2026 demonstrate how a discipline rooted in centuries of material mastery continues to produce work of formal complexity and contemporary relevance.

Warping Timelines: Tradition to Innovation brings together a group of artists whose work spans the full expressive range of bamboo as a sculptural medium, from intimate works of precision and sensitivity to large-scale sculptural forms that test the material's expressive limits.

In dialogue with the bamboo works are large-scale paintings by Jennifer Lynch. A master printer by training, Lynch brings the rigor of printmaking — it's precision, layering, and material intelligence — into expansive painted works. The pairing invites reflection on how discipline and inherited process can be simultaneously honored and reimagined.

Central to the exhibition is new work by Tanabe Chikuunsai IV. Tradition, in Tanabe's hands, is not a fixed inheritance. It is a living discipline. A fourth-generation bamboo artist trained within one of the most demanding master-apprentice traditions in contemporary sculpture, his work is defined by continuous formal experimentation. In Creation Through Collapse – Five Cosmic Elements (2025), he partially coats a densely-plaited tiger bamboo form with tsuchikabe, a mixture of clay, sand, and lime traditionally used to create the earthen walls of Japanese architecture, then finishes it with sprays of black and white paint.

Also featured are works by Morigami Jin, Honma Hideaki, Honma Koichi, Honda Seikai, Kawashima Shigeo, Kojiro Yoshiaki, Nagakura Kenichi, Sugiura Noriyoshi, Sasai Fumie, Honda Syoryu, and Watanabe Chiaki, a cross-section of artists whose collective work affirms the sculptural depth and ongoing evolution of the medium.