Tadashi Kawamata's Bonsai show blends huts and living wood

Tadashi Kawamata’s new solo show Bonsai opened at Galerie Kamel Mennour in Paris on Jan 15 and remains on view through Feb 21, 2026. The exhibition presents a series of small sculptural works in which miniature cabins or tree huts are mounted on twigs and branches, treating bonsai as a starting point for questions of shelter, memory, and technical integration between construction and living wood.

The pieces are not horticultural study; they are poetic riffs on scale and restraint familiar to bonsai practice. Kawamata borrows the miniature scale and the spirit of containment common in bonsai to stage tiny architectures that sit on, around, and with vegetal material. For anyone used to thinking about nebari, jin, or the compact silhouette of an established tree, these works reframe those concerns as problems of joinery, balance, and long term attachment.

Technically the show is compelling to follow. The small huts are attached to branches in ways that foreground structural challenges: how to secure a built form to a living, growing substrate; how to distribute weight across delicate twigs; and how construction techniques interact with the biology of wood. Those are the same tradeoffs bonsai practitioners face when wiring, grafting, or adding accents, but Kawamata routes them into conceptual territory about memory and shelter rather than cultivation. The result is a conversation between arboriculture and architecture happening at a tabletop scale.

The exhibition sits within Kawamata’s international trajectory of site responsive and constructed work, but Bonsai is intimate in its focus. In the gallery at 6 rue du Pont de Lodi the small installations invite close viewing; photography and detailed observation reward attention to material joins, surface wear, and how a twig’s curve shifts the hut’s gesture. For makers and cultivators the show offers fuel for creative experiments that marry carpentry and living material without promising horticultural instruction.

Visit the show before it closes on Feb 21 to see how a contemporary artist translates bonsai’s economy of means into miniature architecture. Expect visual prompts for future projects, fresh ways to think about attachments and aging, and a reminder that bonsai’s power often lies less in botanical technique than in the stories tiny trees and objects can hold.