Tadashi Kawamata’s Temporary Wood Vortex at the Palais de Tokyo Points Toward Reims
For two weeks in February, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris hosted a work that seemed to be in motion even while standing still. Tadashi Kawamata’s Tornado rose through part of the building’s grand staircase in a dense spiral of 5,000 individual pieces of wood, pushing the eye upward toward the glazed ceiling. Guillaume Désanges, president of the institution, said the sculpture felt as if it could remain there indefinitely. It could not.
The installation was supported by Ruinart and occupied a section of the museum usually closed to the public, which helped explain its brief run. The French champagne house commissions a new artist each year for Conversations with Nature, a series that begins in Paris before the work is installed permanently at Ruinart’s headquarters in Reims. Recent participants have included Eva Jospin in 2023 and Julian Charrière in 2025.
Kawamata, a Japanese artist who has lived in Paris for 18 years, has built a career around architecture, instability, and found materials. He says he is drawn to structures that are not fixed, but responsive to the conditions around them. “Architecture is stable, static, maths,” he said. “What I do is accidental and depends on the day.”
That approach took shape in Tokyo in the 1970s, when he was an art student and began working with the wooden frames used to stretch canvas. Born in Hokkaido, he had grown up close to nature, and the city’s pace sharpened his interest in materials that felt provisional rather than polished. In New York in the 1980s, he found a different kind of energy in scrap, graffiti, and urban improvisation. A 1989 installation on a municipal building in Toronto drew complaints from neighbors, who said it created danger and damaged the neighborhood.
Kawamata has never treated permanence as the point. “It’s like the natural world,” he said. “Nothing lasts forever.” That logic now extends to Reims, where the wood from Tornado will be reused later this year in three large-scale works for Ruinart’s sculpture park at 4 Rue des Crayères, which opened in 2024. The park already includes 110 works by 36 artists, among them Nils-Udo, Jeppe Hein, and Cornelia Konrads.
One of Kawamata’s planned works will be an 8m-high observation tower with a platform at 6m, offering visitors a raised view over the landscape. In Kawamata’s hands, even a temporary structure can feel like a way of thinking: about architecture, about touch, and about how art can hold a place without pretending to outlast it.
