Designart Tokyo Turns 10 With Recyclable Tape and Deep-Fried Vases

Designart Tokyo is marking its 10th anniversary with roughly 150 projects by exhibitors from 13 countries, scattered across the city from 30 October to 8 November. The birthday edition's most promising exhibit is a piece of tape. That tells you something about the state of Japanese design, in a good way.

The festival's main venue is the former site of the Tokyo Expressway, also known as the KK Line, a stretch now reborn as an elevated park in the heart of Ginza. On site sits Designart Tokyo's first dedicated design store, selling works from brands including Nendo and Alessi alongside designers Ronan Bouroullec and Kwangho Lee.

Here are six projects worth the train fare.

What makes glue newsworthy?

Tokyo studio Nomura is showing Pulling Apart, an adhesive featured in the Daikanyama exhibition Separation: Designed to Come Apart, a show devoted to products built for fluid disassembly and recycling. Nomura started from a known irritation: glue-based adhesives on timber or metal are often difficult or impossible to remove, leaving indelible marks or blocking recycling at end of life.

The answer is a strong but flexible tape that firmly holds heavy materials in place. Tug it, and it stretches and pulls away cleanly.

"Leave one end within reach behind the plinth or under the tabletop, and when the time comes, a single pull undoes the whole thing," said Nomura.

The tape was developed with easy-disassembly bonding technology from Aica Kogyo Company. It's still a prototype. Fingers crossed it leaves the lab.

Can a lamp growl?

"Peco poco" is a Japanese onomatopoeia for a growling stomach. Experimental studio Howdunit took the phrase literally for a table lamp that unfolds like an accordion via a small hook built into the top of the shade. Made from delicate layers of gauzy textile, the light opens with what the studio calls a "rhythmic 'peco poco' motion" and sits at various heights.

"By continually asking how things are made, we aim to discover new possibilities in design," said founders Haruto Kamijo and Sho Tasaki.

What does a paper company see in a forest?

Tokyo paper manufacturer Oji Holdings is presenting Forest: Perspectives in Ginza, a meditation on how we view forests. The company sent nine professionals — designers, wood specialists, a writer, a chef — into its managed forest network and asked for individual responses. The results include delicately whittled spoons made from fallen branches and wood sheets crafted from bark using a process similar to making washi paper. Local studio We+, founded by Toshiya Hayashi and Hokuto Ando, laid it all out in an encyclopedic display.

How many ways can you fold a box?

Founded in 2021, Tokyo's 21B Studio has landed its first solo show, Box, at Shibuya's brutalist-style Tiers Gallery. The exhibition demonstrates the myriad ways to create a humble paper box through folds and incisions. Visitors get a flatpack poster that, once assembled, resembles the geometric architecture of the gallery itself. A poster you have to build. On brand.

Would you deep-fry a vase?

At Tokyo Midtown, design master's student Cecil Nabenashi is showing vases and bowls made of deep-fried paper and fibres. He borrowed the tempura technique — batter, hot oil — to test whether frying could give design objects a long-lasting finish, using a batter blended from specially developed non-edible ingredients. He told Dezeen his next challenge is a deep-fried garment. Someone call a laundromat.

What happens when Yamaha builds a piano from scraps?

Industrial Romanticism, on show at Minato's Axis Gallery — Japan's first dedicated design gallery, founded in 1981 — is a group exhibition run by designers Yoshiki Matsuyama and Ryota Yokozeki. They invited eight leading Japanese companies, including bathroom brand Toto and camera maker Fujifilm, whose in-house designers created prototypes of familiar products with an imaginative twist.

The standout is a piano by Ryusuke Baba of Yamaha, built from timber that would normally be rejected for an instrument. The keyboard produces an offbeat sound. Scrap wood, sideways charm.

Designart Tokyo 2026 runs at venues across the city until 8 November, which gives anyone in Tokyo ten days to pull the tape and hear the piano for themselves.