Across ruins, museums, and urban edges from Tokyo to Milan, Tadashi Kawamata‘s constructions have attached themselves to the built world—threading through bombed churches, fastening onto museum façades, nesting timber structures within trees. Growing from the sites they inhabit, his interventions graft and brace themselves against existing structures—the site itself becoming part of the engineering. Parasitic in nature, the in-situ becomes more than site-specific—it becomes structurally-responsive, even dependent: bound to its host, drawing both stability and meaning from the architecture from which it emerges.
As this year’s artist of choice for Ruinart‘s 2026 edition of Conversations with Nature, Kawamata transposes this site-responsive practice into the heart of the institution, turning museum into terrain as he stages a brief occupation of the Palais de Tokyo from February 13 to 23, unfolding a series of temporary interventions that activate the museum’s interior and outdoor spaces.
A Temporary Occupation of the Palais de Tokyo
Courtesy of Ruinart.
As you first enter, Tornado loiters above the stairwell—a spiralling vortex of reclaimed wood hovering overhead, pulling the viewer’s gaze upward towards an encumbering storm-like mass of timber looming uncomfortably close. Outside, in typical Kawamata fashion, The Nest clings to one of the museum’s exterior columns, some fifteen metres above the ground—an oversized bird shelter precariously lodged against the building’s monumental façade. A recurring motif in Kawamata’s practice, with earlier iterations in Milan, Yokohama, and Helsinki, the nest introduces a fragile form of habitation into the rigid geometry of the monumental architecture. Perched like a match balanced upside down, the structure embraces a deliberate precariousness, its tangled timber construction appearing as though it might loosen at any moment. Temporary by design, the work reflects Kawamata’s long-standing view of architecture as a transient gesture—one in which building and dismantling belong to the same cycle. As he puts it: “To construct and to destroy—it is the same… Build-up, take down. It is one line.”
Inside, a constellation of small preparatory models and sketches rests on display, exhibiting scale and the artist’s process at both ends of the spectrum. Set against the engulfing intervention above, the modest, tactile studies are not auxiliary but intrinsic to the work itself, tracing the evolution of thought that shapes Kawamata’s process—from miniature experiments to inhabitable structures: “Drawing is already construction… the model is not separate from the installation. It is part of the thinking.”
Permanent Interventions in the Vineyards of Reims
Courtesy of Ruinart.
The presentation marks the opening chapter of Kawamata’s collaboration with Ruinart for the 2026 edition of Conversations with Nature, which will extend to the Maison’s historic address at 4 rue des Crayères in Reims—unfolding a series of timber interventions that embed themselves within both institution and landscape. In Reims, three permanent works—Observatory, Nest, and Tree Hut—will take root across the site. The Observatory, a six-metre wooden tower shaped like an inverted champagne bottle, echoes the verticality of Ruinart’s cathedral-like chalk cellars; the Nest clings to the corner of the historic building, while the Tree Hut perches within the branches of a nearby tree, suspended between ground and canopy.
Comprising two interventions at the Palais de Tokyo and three permanent works within the vineyards of Reims—alongside further presentations across Ruinart’s 30 global art fair partners—the commission extends a practice Kawamata has cultivated for over 5 decades, first gaining traction in 1982, when representing Japan in the Venice Biennale.
Five Decades of Site-Responsive Construction
Courtesy of Ruinart.
Courtesy of Ruinart.
In the years that followed, the artist would insert timber scaffolding into the bombed remains of Kassel’s St. Alban church (documenta 8 (1987)), cling fragile “Favelas” to museum façades in Houston (1991), and suspend debris in quiet reflection over the Tōhoku disaster—grafting unconventional structures across architecture as much inside the institution as the urban landscapes that surround them.
Across metropolitan and pastoral settings alike, his practice has remained anchored in provisional, site-responsive construction, defined by reclaimed wood, exposed seams, and dismantling accepted as a natural conclusion—forming a language extended from site to site and place to place, refined through each intervention rather than ever reinvented.
The materials remain resolutely modest—often weathered or discarded—bearing traces of prior use that carry a memory of their own, an approach that has underpinned his practice from the very beginning. A staple throughout his career, Kawamata operated as an ‘ecologist’ before such a term ever entered into common use, reusing materials at hand and carting them elsewhere to construct something new. Brought on by necessity more than anything else, as a student, he simply couldn’t afford alternatives. Yet, five decades on, what began as a constraint evolved into a core principle of his practice that sits seamlessly in tandem with the rest of his ethos: humble, provisional, exposed to environmental forces beyond his control. Nails remain visible, joints are exposed, construction is left legible. Nothing is concealed or resolved into finish, creating an architecture that preserves the evidence of its own making, favouring process over completion.
When zooming out, this logic carries into the very structure of the works themselves. Rather than asserting autonomy, Kawamata allows them to depend on what already surrounds them—attaching, leaning, and lodging themselves into existing supports. Stability is obtained through relation rather than self-containment, while control is not asserted but deliberately ceded—to gravity, climate, time, forces that Kawamata folds into the very lifecycle of his works. Porous to these conditions, humidity softens wood, wind shifts perception, and dismantling completes the gesture of construction. As he puts it, “We cannot control nature. We cannot fight it. We must accept it.”
Immune to the shifting fashions of the art world, his practice has remained remarkably consistent across the span of his career, anchored in a singular stance: curiosity over message, process over polish, negotiation over control, turning environments inside out as he transforms them into deliberately precarious terrains that recalibrate our perception of space and present us with a fresh view of our surroundings.
The Art of the In-Between
Courtesy of Ruinart.
As we probed him about his practice, his answers meandering much like his work itself, one term surfaced again and again: in-between. “Architects say I am not an architect. Artists say I am not an artist. I am always in between,” Kawamata remarks. A symptom of imposter syndrome or radical humility—who can say—either way, Tadashi refuses to assume either label, his work continually unfolding within these in-between spaces, poised between architecture and sculpture, inside and outside, shelter and exposure, construction and dismantling, harmony and collapse.
Ma, Ba, and a Japanese Philosophy of Space
Courtesy of Ruinart.
Courtesy of Ruinart.
On closer inspection, however, his resistance to definition may have less to do with modesty than a different spatial philosophy, rooted in Japanese thought, where architecture is understood not as a self-contained object, but as a relational event shaped through its surroundings. As described by Catherine Grout, this logic is captured through ma, the charged interval between elements, and ba, the field of interaction that arises once that interval is inhabited. Viewed through this lens, Kawamata’s interventions do not occupy spaces but thresholds, inhabiting the intervals between spatial, temporal, and conceptual conditions (ma) while activating the wider field of experience that unfolds around them (ba).
Extending outward from galleries, his works push through windows, clinging to façades—occupying both gallery and the city, interior and exterior, private and public space, existing in both spaces as it becomes a site of passage between them.
At the level of discipline, this in-between condition takes on another form. Situated between sculpture and architecture, his constructions—nests, huts, towers, and walkways—borrow the language of architecture yet remain too provisional to function as buildings. Evoking habitation without ever fully becoming it, they emerge as a form of partial architecture that adopts its form whilst operating with the open-ended purpose of sculpture.
On another level, time introduces its own interval. Caught between construction and dismantling, these phases collapse into a single gesture: “To construct and to destroy—it is the same”. Built with dismantling in mind, his works resist completion: “Build-up, take down. It is one line”, inhabiting the interval between emergence and disappearance. Visually, this condition is heightened by the precarious compositions themselves, their unstable forms suspended between balance and collapse, perpetually on the verge while never quite reaching it.
Yet beyond these spatial and temporal dimensions, Kawamata’s work gives form to another understanding of ma: not simply as interval, but as experience. As theorists such as Arata Isozaki describe it, ma emerges as a perceptual pause—a moment in which attention sharpens, and the world becomes newly legible. Within this opening, subtle phenomena begin to surface—shifts of light and shadow, movements of air, the presence of surrounding nature—precisely the sensibilities Kawamata’s interventions are designed to evoke.
Rather than commanding attention, his works redirect it; his constructions demanding not to be looked at but to be inhabited, climbed, entered. Movement becomes the medium through which the work unfolds. Operating less as objects than as scenographic environments, his interventions guide the body through space, recalibrating perception at each step: sightlines adjust, distances shift, and attention drifts away from the structure towards the atmosphere it unveils. As Kawamata describes, “they create a story of how you move through the place.”
Champagne, Terroir, and the Logic of Conditions
Courtesy of Ruinart.
In Reims, these perceptual shifts come into full effect: the Observatory elevates the viewer above the vineyard, while the Tree Hut anchors perception within the canopy. Amidst the life-laced vineyards, this shift in perception attunes us with newly heightened sensitivity to the site’s micro-ecologies—mist settling over the fields, nests tucked into branches, the quiet growth of small organisms, precisely the “quiet intricacies” that struck Kawamata on his first visit to Reims: “The fields were covered with mist… I saw small nests in the trees, spiders, small creatures growing together”. As he discovered the grounds, it was not the landscape’s grandeur that captured his attention, but the subtle interdependencies that sustain the ecosystem, the “vibrations of nature” that—allowing them to act—become a constituent of his work, as he sharpens our awareness to them: shifts in air, fluctuations in light, the near-imperceptible vibrations that animate the living environment. Exposed to these forces rather than set apart from them, his interventions do not interrupt this ecology but embed themselves within it, placing both structure and viewer within the same field of conditions.
At Ruinart, these conditions underpin the agricultural rhythms of the terroir—harvest, fermentation, ageing—processes that shape the making of champagne as much as they inform Kawamata’s work. “Champagne production is very much connected to environmental conditions,” he notes. “My work also depends on conditions. Wood reacts to climate. If it is too wet, it becomes soft; if too dry, it becomes hard. It is always changing.”
A particularly fitting choice to represent this year’s Conversations with Nature, in the end, Kawamata offers not an artwork to contemplate, but an experience to inhabit, unfolding in a moment of pause, just like that of tasting champagne. The two, in fact, find symmetry in a myriad of ways: works of labour, sustained through craftsmanship visibly tied to the hand, evolving over time, contingent on conditions beyond their control. Ruled by patience and shaped through attention, they both unfold through cycles of evolution, grounded in the terroir or site from which they ultimately came from.
A Collector’s Jeroboam in Reclaimed Wood
Courtesy of Ruinart.
Finding a more physical expression, Kawamata’s collaboration with Maison Ruinart also extends to a limited-edition collector’s piece: a case designed to house a jeroboam of Ruinart Blanc de Blancs, in which he hollows out and reuses fragments of wood to form a miniature nest—condensing, at the scale of the object, the same gestures of reuse, fragility, and transformation that shape his works in the vineyard. Rough to the touch—the surface remains visibly worked, its form gathered through accumulation rather than design—uneven, layered, unpolished. At once protective and precarious, the miniature structure translates Kawamata’s approach into a concentrated form, allowing the artist to “test balance and tensions” while still preserving his focus on “hand, wood, and time”.
When compared with past commissions—from Eva Jospin‘s layered cardboard landscapes to Jeppe Hein‘s immersive environments—which invited viewers into carefully constructed worlds, Kawamata’s intervention seems to offer a different approach. Rather than depicting landscapes, his works remain bound to them—attaching themselves to what is already there as it unfolds structures as dependent as they are fragile, as temporary as they are precious. In the end, what Kawamata leaves us is not with an object, but with a condition—one that holds only for as long as the forces that sustain it remain in balance.
