Kawabi is the New York-based studio practice of Aaron and Irisa Na-Chan Kawabi. Inspired by their spiritual and aesthetic connection to the East, the studio explores the concept of inheritance and cultural heirlooms through the process of craft. Intentionally handmade and slow, each work incorporates traditional joinery and paper-making techniques while transforming the familiar into new archetypes in form.
Craft centrally connects us to our work by allowing us to directly touch, feel, and sense what we make. It gives us an outlet to process what we experience by connecting what’s in our minds directly to our hands and our bodies. To make functional things by hand, then live with them, share them, experience them over time, generates a circulation of learning and doing that allows us to create belonging with ourselves and with others.
—Aaron & Irisa