"For me her pieces were somewhat akin to butoh. The creation of the washi is a precisely choreographed dance unto itself. There's no better word for her art than 'magical.'"
— Santa Fe magazine publisher Stephanie Burns

Traditional, handmade washi paper. Wrapping for precious gifts. Medium for calligraphy and painting. Noguchi lamps. Wallets. Name cards. Washi is everywhere in Japan. But washi as large format installation art, stunning single-sheet paper tapestries up to 50 feet long?

Situated in a simple, modern concrete building in a narrow old Kyoto neighborhood is the studio and showroom of one of Japan's most successful contemporary artists, Horiki Eriko. Ever since my visit to the studio to view her large-scale works, washi has never been the same for me.

The studio is fitted with polished wooden floors, indirect lighting and sleek furniture. Horiki's demeanor and presentation are the perfect combination of warm hospitality and professionalism, calm yet purposeful, unpretentious yet focused.

Seated on a black leather chair with soothing, electronic music playing in the background, I watch her slide one 15-foot-long piece of washi art after another on ceiling tracks into the center of the room. In some, tiny fibers create delicate swirls around tiny bits of mulberry bark; in others, long, coarse strips of the bark float dramatically in what look like churning whirlpools. The technique may be ancient, but the look is amazingly contemporary.

Washi is famously receptive to light, and as Horiki slowly shifts the light source from the front to the back of the piece, the fibers within the paper become illuminated and then disappear. "Just as the sunlight and shade change all day long," she explains, "we can express the flow of time and the transition of seasons by changing ways of lighting." She illuminates the sheets one by one, then sliding each back into its place with precision and respect.

"Shadow and light are as essential to her artform as the washi itself," says Stephanie Burns, a retired magazine publisher based in Santa Fe who recently saw Horiki's work. "How masterfully she combines the three for the evocative experiences she creates with her installations!"

It takes 10 skilled workers to produce one of Horiki's pieces — five artists and five craftsmen in an elaborate, almost choreographed operation. "We can create washi to specifically match any architectural need or function," she explains. "Washi is handmade, so we can infuse each piece with any kind of image we want."

But there is an additional, unknown element that always finds its way into their art: "Because we cannot completely control the outcome of the finished work, we accept nature as part of this collaborative process."

Horiki, now in her late 30s, came from neither an art nor a craft background. Rather, she began her career in banking and first came into contact with washi while working with a client that specialized in art events. Soon she experimented with making washi for fun, became completely enthralled by the medium, and began to devote herself to producing it as installation art.

"I was a complete amateur when I jumped into this business," she says. But through visits to public buildings, study of their design and decoration, and sheer perseverance, she was able to find a financial backer, and her studio was born 13 years ago.

Today you will find her works installed provocatively in restaurants, hotel lobbies, public halls, and nightclubs throughout Japan — as walls, room dividers and ceilings.

But such public places are plagued with cigarette smoke, direct sunlight and human beings with curious fingers. Washi can tear, burn, lose color, get dirty, contract and expand, making it difficult to use as a building material. "At the beginning," Horiki says, "I didn't know my left from my right and just plunged in, thinking, 'why not give it a try?' If I had had more experience, I would only have seen impossibility in the task I had chosen."

Horiki found the solution in technology, sandwiching her washi in glass and allowing the stunningly warm, soft and radiant paper to thrive in the harshest environments. But since standard glass creates distracting reflections, her team had to painstakingly innovate ways to prevent glare, all while following safety laws that obliged them to use the same shatterproof glass as in car windshields. In addition to being artists, her crew must also be scientists.

It takes as much effort to protect the washi as it does to design and create it. But Horiki takes it all in stride: "I have always believed that, no matter how seemingly impossible a project, if it is an idea which came from a human mind, then a human mind can come up with a solution. I must go forward and do it."

One of Horiki's most exciting recent projects was a collaboration with cellist Yo Yo Ma, a 45 foot long by 12 foot high single piece of washi that is the stage backdrop for his "Silk Road" concert tour, which debuted last year at Carnegie Hall. "Yo Yo Ma first found out about us when he saw our work here in Kyoto," Horiki explains. "We talked about the traditional and innovative aspects of washi, and new possibilities in music and stage decoration."

"The Silk Road symbolizes the connection between time and place," Horiki says, and her team worked for two months to create a set embodying the essence of the Silk Road, the ancient Asian highway which connected peoples of many cultures from east to west. For some 20 minutes during the show, the entire stage environment slowly changes as Horiki's work is illuminated through lighting techniques corresponding to the inflection of the music. The Silk Road tour will continue for another three years through Europe and Asia, and Horiki is anxious to attend another performance.

Another collaboration was with the copperplate print artist Yamamoto Yoko. Using Yamamoto's design, Horiki built an electric automobile out of washi. Exhibited in Hanover, Germany, the two-seater can move at speeds of up to 75 miles per hour. "We named it 'Firefly,'" she says, "because it travels along quietly, illuminated from the inside."

Committed to excellence, energized by challenges, talented and hard working, Horiki Eriko is an inspiring example of how traditional Japanese crafts are being reinvented for the 21st century.

Yet to a Westerner her pieces might not even look Japanese, but amazingly international. Horiki chalks this up, in part, to the flow of ideas enabled by our contemporary world: "People meet and are influenced by each other, people are influenced by previous eras, people from different countries influence each other. From all of this interchange comes the birth of a new culture."