Renowned designer and dedicated table tennis fanatic Katsumi Asaba opens the exhibition "Sense of Humor" at 21_21 Design Sight with a bit of Nankin tamasudare (literally translated as Nanjing lily), a type of street performance in which a screen made from bamboo slats is twisted into surprising forms. Kicking off the show by donning a "funny" Chinese hat and bringing up Nanjing is unsettling, but OK, let's see what happens.
"A sate! A sate!" Asaba chants (it's not really translatable, but might be akin to "hey!"), and through deft prestidigitation, the bamboo slats transform into a fishing rod, then a bridge and a halo. In keeping with the theme around which Asaba has gathered together work from various artists and designers from around the world, he comically fumbles a move and says "This is really difficult."
This gets quite a good laugh from the preview audience, but despite what the title suggests, the exhibition is more about playing with viewer expectations than out-and-out comedy. Asaba's own work in the show includes examples of his use of Dongba script, writing symbols that first appeared in southern China in the seventh century and one of a handful of pictographic language systems still currently in use, and documentation of various projects devised by Asaba using table tennis as an activity promoting human interaction and as an inspiration for design.